


Gravity Bend

by LordKootenay



Series: Gravity Bend Trilogy [1]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Canada, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, British Columbia, Canada, F/F, F/M, Gen, Genderbending, Gratuitous descriptions of trees, Hipsters, Lesbian Character, Mystery, POV Lesbian Character, Paranormal, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-19
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:01:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 57,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27627157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LordKootenay/pseuds/LordKootenay
Summary: Go figure, it's another Gravity Falls gender-swap AU. Among other changes.[Essentially, if I fell into a world where the series never was and I had free reign to write it as a fantasy novel...]Lyra Pines expected a dull summer when she and her twin brother Max were sent off to live with their Great-Uncle Stan at the Mystery Shack, a hokey tourist trap in a hidden-away part of British Columbia.  But being away from home at fourteen, or so Max says, is the perfect setup for a season of new friends, romance, and fun in the sun.  And even steadfastly unromantic Lyra is beginning to feel the stirrings of love, albeit in the last way she expected.And it might have been that simple, if not for the book.Hidden away in a tree trunk, Lyra discovers an impossible journal, by an anonymous author, detailing the supernatural secrets hidden around the strange town of Gravity Falls.  Now, suddenly there are fairies in the forest, monsters in the river, conspiracies in the history books, and mischievous ghosts in the 7-11 – and it’ll take all the twins’ wits to save the Mystery Shack from powerful forces.
Series: Gravity Bend Trilogy [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2019962
Kudos: 1





	1. Book One: The Tourist Trap

**I**

**June 25, 2012**

One day in early summer, Max and Lyra’s parents told them, “Kids, you need some fresh air for the summer. And you wanted to see somewhere other than Ontario. We were thinking of sending you down to British Columbia.”

“B.C.!” Max shouted. His mind was racing with thoughts of surfing, all-year skiing, and Vancouver shopping. He paused for a moment. “But why B.C.?”

“Because Grandpa Shermy’s brother lives in, what do they call it, the Kootenay.”

“The Interior?” Max cried, Whistler daydreams evaporating. He’d never heard anyone say anything much about the B.C. Interior, but the little he had heard was mostly harsh jokes.

“East of the Interior,” his father corrected, “Some smaller town. It’d be good for the both of you to do some travelling alone. Anyways, with Shermy passed away last year, your great-uncle… Oh, I can never remember his name… Might like to see some family.”

Neither Max nor Lyra had ever even known that Grandpa Shermy – who they saw quite little of when he was alive – had had a brother. The twins went together to their mother and asked.

“My uncle Stanford,” she confirmed, “Dad never talked much about him. Or really about growing up at all. I only met Stan once or twice. He was older than dad and moved out when dad was still pretty young. I do remember hearing that he graduated from physics in university. God knows what for, since I’ve heard he runs some sort of tacky museum now.”

Hefty bags were packed, and at the ebb of June, the twins boarded a long-haul Greyhound out of the bristly woods of the lake country and, for days and nights on end, across the vast and boring prairies. They lay slumped together in their seats, trading off for the window every few hours as bright gold canola fields rolled by. They read, shared facts from the _Handbook of the Canadian Rockies_ they’d brought, listened to their ipods, and slept fitfully through the night that began somewhere in Manitoba. Lyra wrote up random ciphers, asked Max to encode notes in them, and then ripped up the key and tried to decrypt them. Their legs grew numb, despite the routine trips surfing the aisle down to the bus’s tiny bathroom.

Then, on the last day, they plunged into the imposing wall of the Alberta front ranges and were among bristling evergreens. The forest piled up to great rock ridges that burst from the earth. An endless city of battlemented castles on an inhuman scale surrounded the maze of river valleys through which the secondary highways wound in great zig-zags.

They passed over the continental divide in a place called Goldeneye Pass, where the road clung tight along the steep slope of a misty canyon, blanketed in trembling high-altitude spruce, and launched over a towering concrete bridge. Far below, a river ran over enormous boulders, milky with glacial silt and frigid-looking even from that height. From the high pass, it was a long coast down to a little town called Gravity Falls.

Disembarking at long last, they followed their directions from the bus stop to a parking lot in a road off the highway among mossy old-growth forest. In the clearing just beyond stood a peculiar house – a two-story wooden A-frame, paint peeling, listing dangerously. From this basic form, Great-Uncle Stanford had added two shed-roofed expansions on the front and side, one the museum of strange and shoddy artifacts, the other the gift shop where one could and would be coerced into buying expensive and even shoddier replicas of the same. The highest roof was adorned with a giant sign reading MYSTERY SHACK, and a smaller one modifying this with WORLD FAMOUS! This was a stretch to say the least.

There was no front door to knock on. The gift shop had been built in front of where it should have been. There was, however, a tour group filtering into the museum. The twins shared a glance, and wordlessly decided to join the line.

Inside the dusty half-lit gallery, the twins had to be careful not to knock their bags into the tightly packed glass cases of jackalopes and spooky masks. Great-Uncle Stan – it must have been him – stood in a tuxedo, eyepatch, and fez, leaning on an 8-ball-topped cane. He was describing a Sasquatch on a podium to a distracted audience. To Lyra’s eye the Sasquatch looked like a store mannequin taxidermized over with rabbit fur.

At the end of the tour, Lyra and Max followed Stan as he herded the group towards the gift shop. They broke away just long enough for Max to run up and introduce the two of them.

“So, you’re the Ontario kids, eh?” He laughed aloud at this, as if it were the best joke he’d ever made, “Stan Pines. Yeah, your dad called ahead. Let me show you where you’ll be sleeping.”

Stan led them up the creaking steps of the gift shop and inside. A fraction of the tour group was poking around at the paranormal-themed tchotchkes. The cashier, a pretty, red-haired girl a few years older than the twins, was paying them little mind. Her eyes perked up from behind thick wayfarer glasses to see her boss leading a pair of unfamiliar fourteen-year-olds into his house, but she said nothing, and Stan said nothing in return.

Max reached out to touch a large jar of eyeballs resting on the shelf. Stan moved with unbelievable speed for a man of his age to block him.

“No touching the merchandise unless you’re planning to buy it!” he snapped.

Max sulked into his sweater neck and they carried on through the back door of the shop, the former front door of the house. Inside was a living room sparsely furnished with ratty couches. The TV was the only thing in sight that looked remotely modern. From the living room, they took even creakier stairs to the upstairs corridor. From the upstairs corridor, Stan pulled down an attic ladder from a ceiling hatch and beckoned them to climb. These stairs, continuing the pattern of increasing creakiness, were practically screaming with every fiber of their tenaciously attached rungs.

A few steps up, Max paused to look at his palm.

“Cool! Splinters!” he said and plucked them out.

Two cots had been laid in the attic, tucked under the opposing slopes of the roof where they met the floor. A crate labelled GRŒMBLIN’S GREMLINS AND GOBLINS was placed between them at the head as a shared nightstand, and a cheap electric lantern stood atop this. Behind the crate, a window let in welcome light. Though the window had been framed to match the triangle of the space itself, Stan had clearly and understandably been unable to find a matching pane of glass. Instead a round window, like a ship’s porthole, had been nailed into place in the middle of the triangle, and the corners filled with plywood. Rays of sun through the porthole showed a snowstorm of dust.

“Cozy,” said Max.

“There’s a goat on my bed,” Lyra observed.

Stan bolted up the ladder upon hearing this.

“Gompers!” he shouted, “You’re not supposed to be up here! Come on!”

The twins watched in astonishment as Stan wrestled Gompers under one arm and carried him down the ladder. A few minutes later, Stan returned alone.

“Sorry about that,” he said, “That goat gets everywhere. Mostly places goats shouldn’t be able to get, and then he can’t get down. I’m pretty sure he’s a demon or something.”

And that was about as concise and accurate of an introduction to life at the Mystery Shack as one could get.

* * *

**II**

**June 28**

It was a typical mountain summer. The weather swung wildly and without pattern, no forecast more than half accurate. Days were often moist and muggy, an energy-sapping finger of Okanagan climate drifting up into the mountains and fighting against the smoke drifting from forest fires to the north. 

Though Lyra and Max were no payroll employees of the Mystery Shack, Stan did put them to work. Their typical duties included facing the gift shop, clearing garbage and dust, and chasing away the ravens and whiskeyjacks from the crooked totem pole mounted on the lawn. Thanks to Gompers, there was mercifully no mowing for anyone. 

In fairness to Stan, the Shack was never so busy as to necessitate especially strenuous days. Most of their time in the Shack was spent hanging out in the gift shop with the Mystery Shack’s two other employees.

Stan’s ever-present handyman, for the Shack was an exercise in the most amateurish of architectural practice in constant need of care, was a guy named Soos. He was a bit of an enigma. He was either Hispanic or Native, and no one could say what Soos was short for. Regardless, Soos was chubby, amiable, and faced the world with a childlike wonder. It was hard for anyone to dislike him.

Wendy Cordon, a red-haired, bespectacled, and chronically lazy eighteen-year old, was the cashier in the gift shop. Stan often bemoaned that his least motivated worker was slotted in the position that pulled in the most profit for the Shack, and was therefore, to him, the most important. But Wendy had no technical skills, and she certainly couldn’t be trusted to run tours, so in the absence of applicants, the gift shop it was for her.

The twins were just beginning to get properly settled into the routine of their attic bedroom and chintz-filled house on the day that Max was crouched behind a shelf in the shop, watching a girl inspect a note she’d found suspiciously shoved through the merchandise.

_Hello cute girl! My name’s Max. I was the boy standing next to you all through your tour. I have a question. Do you like me? Check one._

  * _Yes_
  * _Definitely_
  * _Absolutely_



He’d rigged it.

Lyra caught the girl’s quizzical reading and tiptoed up over her shoulder to see what it said. It took her less than two seconds.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Lyra, “You can throw that out. Please. I’ll deal with him.”

Lyra strode over to where Max was predictably hid.

“I know you’re going through your girl crazy phase, but I think you’re taking the crazy part a little far,” she said.

“Please,” said Max, standing up and stretching out his legs, “This is our first summer away from home. We’re in a quirky setting. We’re fourteen. If this isn’t the perfect setup for an epic summer romance, I couldn’t think of one.”

“I get that. No, I do, I’ve seen movies. But you don’t have to flirt with every girl who stops here.”

“Mock me if you will, sister. But I have a good feeling about this summer. I wouldn’t be surprised if the woman of my dreams walked in that door right now.”

In fact, there was someone at the door – they could all hear the creak of shoes on the porch steps. Seconds later, Stan walked in, belched, and choked as it caught in his throat.

Lyra held back a laugh.

Still, she wondered if she should start flirting with some guys herself. She entertained the thought for about a half-second before deciding she wouldn’t enjoy it.

“Okay, look alive, people,” said Stan, “I need someone to nail up some signs in the forest.”

“Not it!” Lyra said quickly.

“Not it,” Max followed.

“Not it,” Soos called from across the room.

“Nobody asked you, Soos,” said Stan.

“And I’m comfortable with that,” said Soos.

Stan turned to the counter and the last remaining Shacker.

“Wendy,” he said, “That makes you It.”

“I would,” said Wendy, extending an arm for the sign without moving from her seat, “But, ugh, I can’t reach it.”

“I’d fire all of you if I could get replacements, you know that,” said Stan.

“You’d have to pay us to fire us,” said Max cheerfully.

Stan put an arm out and started to turn lazily.

“All right. Let’s make it eenie, meenie, minie, you.” When he stopped, his hand was pointed within a few degrees of Lyra.

“No way,” said Lyra, “I feel like when I’m in those woods, I’m being watched.”

Stan actually laughed aloud “Not you too!”

“Something’s strange about this town,” Lyra insisted, “I haven’t seen anything myself yet, but our bus driver told us that last time she got out in this valley, she got a bunch of mosquito bites that spelled out BEWARE on her arm.”

As she said it, Lyra realized how ridiculous that particular story sounded.

“Hogwash, baloney, phooey,” said Stan, “Your bus driver doesn’t even live here. I do. Quit being so paranoid and nail these up on some trees you can see from the highway south of here. It’s not hard work. They don’t even need to be straight. Look, the whole monsters in the forest line is just local legend drummed by guys like me to sell junk to guys like, well, you’ve seen the tour groups.”

Grumbling for effect, Lyra took a hammer and a box of extra-long nails from the supply closet and headed out to the porch. There, leaning against the steps, were some three-foot-long arrow-shaped plywood signs which Soos had made the day before. They read:

WORLD FAMOUS

GRAVITY FALLS

MYSTERY SHACK

JUST AHEAD

Lyra gathered the signs, two under each arm, and began to lug them across the lawn, across the parking lot, and down the road to the highway. Minivans and trucks roared past, monstrous. She dropped the signs in the ditch and stood in the center of the northbound lane, trying to figure out the best way to position the arrows to be noticed by drivers.

Well, there was a marshy spot off the ditch at a bend in the road, and some thick cedars just beyond. That should work well – though she would have to pick her way around the little slough.

Lyra went first with just the WORLD FAMOUS sign and the nails, picking her way through brambles around the spongy edge of the retreated slough. No one had pushed through here in a long time, maybe never. Why would they? But that was fortunate for the signs since they wouldn’t be easily vandalized.

WORLD FAMOUS was fastened with a single nail, slightly askew in an appropriately eerie way, on the leftmost of two choice trees. It had taken some time, holding it against the tree with a shoulder while keeping both hands free to nail through the dense board. 

Once it was done, Lyra high-stepped back over the bush path she had made to bring around the GRAVITY FALLS arrow and thought about how to place it. Below the first sign, or to the right on the other tree? She decided that it didn’t matter, since she didn’t care enough about luring tourists anyways. The second tree made more sense, probably.

The second sign was just as hard going as the first. Lyra felt like she was bang, bang, banging away for ten minutes before she felt the release that meant the nail had passed through the last layer of plywood. The cedar bark behind was mercifully softer – it would only be a few more taps and then she’d be halfway done.

_Clang._

She thought at first that she must have struck the blow in an off direction. Readjusting the nail, she swung again. There was no mistaking it this time – the tip of the nail was striking metal, behind the bark of the tree.

Laying down the sign, Lyra tested with a second nail, visible this time. Sure enough, it sunk the thickness of the bark, and struck a xylophone chord on the cedar’s heartwood. Heart-metal?

Dropping the hammer, the signs forgotten, Lyra’s fingers went to the grooved flakes of bark. It seemed exactly like every other tree she’d seen in her life. Only, no… it was subtle, and it would have been impossible to see if she hadn’t been looking for it, but there was a thin fissure, a fault line – the pattern of the bark broken and begun again. Lyra traced the fissure up to a corner, and it turned to the left. Further, further, and it turned down again, and to the right. There was a perfectly placed rectangle of bark that had been cut out and replaced.

Lyra’s mind was racing with possibilities but couldn’t land on one long enough to develop it. _Hammer_. With the help of its claw, jammed into the hidden crack, the piece of bark came off easily, though not perfectly along the fault lines. The bark had rotted together a little. Whoever had cut the panel hadn’t done so recently.

Behind the bark, jammed into a hole carved out of the tree’s heartwood, was a metal box like a gym locker. There was no lock, and the door swung open easily.

An overpowering smell of musk hit Lyra’s nose. The locker was silky thick with cobwebs and the walls were streaked with insect carcasses. 

The only other thing in the locker, underneath a mound of carapaces and dead spiders, was a book.

It was a little wider than your typical hardback novel, but not as big as one of those big flat coffee table books, and thin for its dimensions. It was bound in deep red, half-rotted leather. The only marking on the book’s cover was an age-dulled brass panel, roughly cut into the shape of a hand and bound on with apparently randomly nailed pins. It was an odd-looking hand at that. Engraved into the hand-shaped panel was a letter 3, just as roughly shaped. Though the book looked professionally bound, in fact, it looked to be nothing more than an old buy-and-fill moleskin, the brass hand was amateurish. Soos could have cut a better-looking hand with his jig saw – and it would have only had five fingers! That was the unusual thing. The hand on the cover had six!

Lyra tore aside the cobwebs and with her most delicate touch, drew the journal from its hiding place. She blew to clear the cover of dust, and blew again, because it was still dusty. Then she cautiously peeled back the cover and looked into the book’s yellowed heart.

On the endpaper of the front cover, a careful hand had printed, “property of…” but a rotted spot concealed the name. The opposite simply read, “Volume Three.”

Lyra turned to the next page, and beheld a long entry inked in the same careful hand. The header proclaimed a date some three decades old.

Buoyed by the thrill of unsanctioned archaeology, Lyra began to read. Despite the easy hand of the author, the text was slow going, degraded so that quite a few words could only be implied or guessed from context. Some patches were entirely indecipherable and had to simply be pressed past.

_It’s difficult to believe it’s been six years since I began studying the strange and wondrous, and yes, sometimes frightening, anomalies of the No[???]ch H[??????]rk that make Gravity Falls such a unique base of research…_ It began.

Lyra kept flipping, and revealed…

_Giant Vampire Bats_

_Religious Customs of Fairies_

_Counteracting Hypnotic Magic_

Each of these entries filled a page or more with detailed, precisely dimensioned sketches, paragraphs of shorthand writing, bullet-point lists, hand-drawn maps. Pasted-in, blurry photographs occasionally tried to reveal the strange creatures described in the text and sketches in a truer light.

_Shape-Shifters & Other Examples of Self-Modifying Biology_

_Evidence of DRAGONS? (Investigate w. further prep)_

_Musings on the Afterlife and Advanced Technology_

It was like a fantasy novel. Only, there was no story, no characters – just the intimately detailed science of a secret world. The just-beyond-reach was pulled into reach. The unrevealed was revealed. Was this someone’s pet project for a role-playing game? An elaborate concept for a practicing artist? Or – Lyra’s heart might have skipped a beat – an honest attempt to account the unaccountable?

Halfway through was a diagram of some complex machinery, labeled all in numeric ciphers. The page after that was headed with…

_TRUST NO ONE!_

_suspicions have been confirmed. I am being watched. Beyond known corridors I am growing evermore paranoid that the image of a rift is itself rift. For an ey[??]o[????]phe[???]o fall upon th[???]esse[??]ct[??]ene[????]r would be beyond catastrophic. Have burned all my dollar bills and now I must hide this journal before He finds it. Hide it from myself. _

And then, all of a sudden, the entries stopped. Every page beyond was blank.

“Trust no one,” Lyra recited.

“Watchya reading! Some nerd thing?”

Lyra screamed and slammed the journal shut harder than its delicate binding might have preferred. Max was standing in the brambles behind her, looking on. She’d been so engrossed in the enigmatic writings that she hadn’t heard him approach.

“It’s nothing,” said Lyra.

Max tried to peer over her shoulder. Lyra hugged the amazing book close to her chest, cover-side-in.

“Are you really not going to show me?” Max asked, his tone suspended somewhere between bemusement and true befuddlement.

Lyra let down her guard. He was right, of course. If there was anyone in the universe she could show this curio to, it was Max. But not here, such a short distance from a busy road.

Turning about, Lyra showed him the journal’s front cover, the threadbare red binding, the brass hand with the hacked-on 3. Max’s eyes widened, then crinkled in analysis.

“What’s that?”

“I’ll show you somewhere private. Let’s head to the attic.”

* * *

**III**

“It’s all here,” said Lyra, “The dark secrets of Gravity Falls. And Great-Uncle Stan said I was being paranoid!”

Max lay on his cot flipping gingerly through the journal. A thin afternoon light cast through the triangular window’s eyelike pane.

“You think this is for real, then?” he said, “Don’t get me wrong, I’d like it to be too. But there’s not a lot of evidence.”

“There’s not,” Lyra agreed, “But any of those ghost hunting TV shows would kill for that book. It’s not evidence, but it’s detailed enough to lead to evidence if we follow the traces it says exist. I was wondering about how we’d wring any fun out of this summer, and I think we’ve just found the answer. Paranormal investigations!”

Max closed the book gently, laid it on the floor and rolled over.

“Maybe,” he said, unconvinced, “That was always your thing, I know. But hey, why not. If you want to find unicorns in the woods, I’ll tag along. Are there unicorns in that book?”

“No clue,” said Lyra, “I haven’t read every page in the thing in the twenty minutes I’ve had it.”

“Well, I hope it’s real just so we can find some unicorns tomorrow,” Max giggled, “Not today, though. This guy’s got a date.”

It took Lyra a moment to realize that he meant a date as in, a proper Date.

“Let me get this straight, Max, I was gone half an hour, and in that time, you got a date?”

“What can I say!” Max sang, “I guess I’m just that irresistible!” 

He slammed the journal shut a little harder than Lyra would have liked given its fragile binding. She would need to get that redone somehow.

“In fact, I should start getting ready,” Max continued, scrounging through his not-yet-unpacked bag for the most dateworthy clothes he could scavenge, “Tell Great-Uncle Stan that I’ll be in the bathroom for the next fifteen minutes. My _new girlfriend_ will be here at eight.”

“Tell him yourself,” Lyra muttered. While Max descended from the attic, she retrieved the Journal and placed it delicately on the Grœmblins crate.

“What are you? Who made you?” Lyra said to herself, and to the book. It was the first time she’d voiced the question, but she had a feeling it wouldn’t be the last.

IV

True to Max’s word, the gift shop doorbell rang a few minutes before eight. A pale and acne-ridden girl in a ratty trench coat stood on the porch.

“Hi!” Max cried, running down the stairs when he heard Stan open the door, “Lyra, Great-Uncle Stan, this is my new girlfriend.”

“’Sup?” said the girl, in a thin and high-pitched voice.

“Hey,” said Lyra.

“How’s it hanging,” said Stan.

“We met over by the cemetery this afternoon,” Max explained. “I know, right? But it’s a pretty spot. Very dramatic. She’s very deep, you see.”

“Mm-hm,” said Lyra, “What’s your name?”

“Normal.”

“What?”

“Nora.”

“Oh.” Lyra noticed a smear of red, more than just a patch of acne, on her face, “Are you bleeding, Nora?”

Nora’s arm went awkwardly and haltingly to her face. She wiped at the patch of blood and licked her fingers.

“It’s jam,” said Nora.

“I love jam!” said Max, taking her arm, “Well, family, see you around!”

Max skipped onto the porch, dragging Nora behind him. She bounced off the door frame before finding her way out and leaving the door open.

There was something about Nora that made Lyra suspicious. Seeking to put it out of mind, she retreated to the attic and started flipping through the journal again. She stopped at a page on _Why Death Doesn’t Work Here_

_I’ve come to a conclusion and it only leads to more questions. All the ghosts I’ve investigated across the country have been hoaxes. The exception of course is as always Gravity Falls. ½ or more of ghosts investigated in vicinity of GF are genuine. How? Why here? Related to NHA? How?_

_Consider: what death is. What life is (not to get philosophical). Energy (“consciousness”) inhabits biological (sometimes digital or [???]ct[??]n) bodies. Energy functions cease on death. Can energy be imparted to new form? This is fundamental question of all ~~paranormal~~ ~~religions~~ ~~worldviews~~ human experiences throughout history._

_Consider:_

  * _Living: body, energy_
  * _Dead: body, no energy_
  * _Ghosts: no body, energy (impossible?)_
  * _Robots: artificial body, energy (see vol. 2 pg. 38)_
  * _Zombies: body, partial energy (see pg. 26)_



_Perhaps there exists invisible semi-physical “body” for ghosts only within GF? Part of [??]rw[?????]il[???]eop[????]ech?_

This last long patch of rot was so frustrating that it drove Lyra to give up on that page. And then, she thought of Nora, stumbling about as if her own living energy wasn’t quite there.

_Body, partial energy…_ Lyra gingerly went to page 26 of the journal to see a large sketch of a decaying body.

_Given much public press in so-called “fiction,” Zombies are semi-animated human corpses. Dangerous due to their basic mental capacity lacking empathy and other fully human traits. Usually easily identified: move, without coordination, but are clearly dead, or have been. However recently deceased zombies can appear almost human, but pale. They may leak blood. Do NOT mistake as just a particularly moody teenager._

Oh, no.

Lyra flew to the porthole and looked out at the parking lot. Max and ‘Nora’ were just about to turn onto the highway when the girl stumbled towards him, arms out, and seized him by the shoulders. Lyra was about to cry out when Nora drew back, leaving Max with a chain of linked daisies around his neck. He giggled.

Well, okay. But she was going to keep investigating.

* * *

**V**

**June 30**

For the next couple of days, Lyra divided her attention between Max’s impending peril at Nora’s hands, and the book that promised to save him.

“Soos,” she said, as soon as she next saw the mechanic, “Is my brother really dating a zombie, or am I just going crazy?”

“It’s a conundrum, to be sure,” said Soos, screwing in an authentically eerie flickering light bulb in the museum.

“You’ve seen the gal, right? She’s got to be a zombie.”

“She could be. How many brains have you seen her eat?”

“Well, none.”

“Look, Chica, I believe you. I’m always seeing weird stuff in this town. I’m pretty sure the mailman’s a werewolf. But you’ve got to have evidence, right, otherwise people will say you’re just a big-league cuckoo clock.”

Lyra sighed.

“As always, Soos, you’re right.”

“Always! My wisdom is both a blessing and a curse. Now, I am needed elsewhere. The porta-potties are clogged again.”

So, Lyra left the Mystery Shack to prowl the woods and streets of Gravity First. Looking back, this was significant. Though the summer was in its infancy, it was her first of what would turn out to be a good many hunts for the supernatural.

After talking with Soos, she took a camera and notebook in hand, and followed Max and Nora to the meadow just down the highway for a picnic and a frisbee toss. The likely zombie was obviously terrible at catching a frisbee and stumbled to the ground more than once. Lyra caught this, though she wondered if she was wasting film.

She'd brought along one of her more prized possessions, a vintage polaroid whose negatives she developed herself. Max claimed, not without reason, that this was perhaps the nerdiest hobby imaginable. Maybe. It wasn't the kind of hobby a girl who'd grown up having friends would've had time for. But Lyra found darkrooms and the smell of silver solutions relaxing, and hadn't she heard that ghosts and magic messed with electronics? So if the Journal was to be believed, a digital camera would have been no good anyways.

The next day, they went to brunch at a greasy-looking restaurant called Lazy Susan’s Diner on the outskirts of the town proper. Lyra sat at a booth at the other end of the dining room with a book she didn’t read. She ordered a Nanaimo bar and ate it slowly. Again, there was little evidence of anything really suspicious, but Lyra noticed that Nora ate next to nothing – she ordered a small sandwich, which she ate about a bite of every five minutes. In between, she said little, staring at Max in ominous silence. She never took off her coat, even though it was late June, even when they were inside.

So, that afternoon, Lyra confronted Max in the attic. He’d come up to change, despite his clothes being perfectly clean and only having a half-dozen changes packed for the summer, but Lyra was waiting when he came up the ladder.

“We need to talk about Nora,” she said.

“Do we ever!” said Max, “Look at what she gave me!” He pointed to a red patch on her chin.

“No, I mean… Is that a hickey?”

“Ha! Gullible! No, it’s an accident with the leaf blower. I was practicing kissing on it in case she tried anything at brunch – that was fun.”

“Weird. But what I’m saying is, Nora’s not what she seems! I was looking at that journal…”

Max gasped. “Do you think she might be a vampire! That’d be so summer romance-y!”

“Guess again, brother! She’s this!”

Max frowned at the page of the supernatural journal that Lyra had presented to him.

“Fairies? What, you think she’s, like, five fairies in a trench coat?”

“What – no! That was the wrong page. She’s a zombie.”

Max guffawed and turned away to fish a pair of socks out of his bag. When he turned back, he wasn’t smiling anymore.

“It all adds up,” Lyra continued, “The bleeding, the limp. And she never blinks, did you notice that? Your girlfriend is dead, and half her soul is gone.”

“Maybe she’s blinking when you’re blinking. Who watches if people blink, for God’s sake? Go downstairs, I need to change.”

“Remember what the book says about Gravity Falls? Trust no one!” Before she was finished saying this, Lyra found herself being pushed towards the ladder.

“Yeah what about me? You can’t trust me?”

Max forced Lyra out below the trapdoor.

“She’s going to eat your brain!”

Holding his sister down at arm’s length, Max said, “Listen, Lyra. Nora and I are going to the movies in town tonight. She’s going to be dreamy, and I’m going to be adorable. And I am not going to let you ruin it with one of your crazy conspiracies!”

He sent her stumbling to the floor and drew up the ladder. The trap door slammed hard.

Lyra dusted herself off and went downstairs. There was no hope in swaying Max once his mind was set on something. And try as she might, Soos was still right. There was no evidence.

Max was changed and gone within minutes. Falling onto the living room couch, Lyra retrieved the photos she'd developed earlier. Seen objectively, she realized, they just looked like a teenage boy on happy, wholesome dates with his clumsy and greasy girlfriend. Max and Nora playing hopscotch on the sidewalk outside Lazy Susan's (she fell over). Max and Nora sharing a pop. Nora snaking her hand around Max's shoulders, her hand falling off and her quickly reattaching it... Wait a minute.

Lyra squinted at the photo. Sure as anything, there it was: Nora’s hand falling out of his coat sleeve for just a moment, before the girl grabbed it from the seat back and shoved it back in.

Lyra was off the couch in an instant and out the gift shop door, calling for Great-Uncle Stan. He was on the front lawn, preoccupied with a gaggle of tourists he was leading to his outdoor artifacts.

“And here we have a rock that looks like a face,” said Stan, proudly displaying a rock that looked like a face.

“It looks like a rock,” said a man.

“It is a rock. It’s a rock that looks like a face.”

“Is it a face?”

“No! It’s a rock that looks like a face! It’s not an actual face!”

There was no breaking into the crowd to talk to him. Even if she could, Lyra realized, it would be tough going to convince Stan to drive after them. But who else was around that could?

Wendy. She’d rushed past her in the gift shop. But she walked to work every day! Although… Stan owned a golf cart, which he sometimes hooked to a train of wagons for “tours.” Wendy might have keys.

“Wendy!” said Lyra, “I need to borrow the golf cart to save my brother from a zombie!”

Wendy was reading a magazine at the till when she burst into the gift shop. Unphased, she tossed her the keys and called, “Good luck! Don’t hit any pedestrians!”

Lyra ran around to the back of the house where the cart was parked. Soos was nearby at the tool cupboard. Noticing Lyra as she started the cart, he asked, “Going to find those zombies?”

“Yes!” said Lyra.

Soos passed her a shovel.

“Giv’er, dude.”

“Thanks, Soos.”

Lyra punched the gas, and the chase was on.

* * *

**VI**

On the edge of town, Nora led Max to a thinly trod path that stretched into the shadowy old-growth.

“You should check this place out,” she said, “It’s really romantic.”

He didn’t question it. If they never got to the movie, no loss.

After a couple minutes, they came to a fork, and she led him down a trail that quickly diminished to little more than a deer track. Then she turned to face him.

All was quiet. The occasional distant howl of a car on the highway was smothered by the textures of loam and peeling cedar bark. Max couldn’t tell if it was sunny or overcast, with the canopy of boughs blocking out the sky.

“Now that we’re alone,” said Nora, “There’s something I need to tell you.”

“Oh, Nora, you can tell me anything,” said Max, and laid a hand on her arm. Something underneath kicked at his palm. She drew away from his touch.

He hoped she was a vampire.

Wordlessly, Nora’s hands groped at the buttons of her coat. One by one they came undone to reveal the zipper. And then – _ziiiip –_ that was off too.

Max blinked, and then was thoroughly confused.

The faces of two two-foot-tall women stared up out of Nora's low-slung pants. Two others were perched on their shoulders, holding a pair of very realistic mannequin forearms and hands at the end of their own tiny arms. A fifth woman perched on the shoulders of these two, a woman with an oversized head – Nora's head. All five women were slender, dressed in bullrush gowns, and had insectoid wings hanging down their backs.

“You look like you’re in shock,” said the little woman on top, “Is this too unexpected? You can sit down if you like.”

Max did, or rather, he tumbled to the forest floor somehow. The little woman spoke with Nora’s voice. She _was_ Nora – had been all along.

“Right,” the fairy continued, “So, we’re five fairies in a trench coat – that one’s out of the way, first of all, call me Lady Vigrid, high queen of this valley. Down there is Lady Snake, lady Quartz, Lady Hummingbird, and… You, left leg, I can never remember your name.”

“Lady Slough,” said Nora’s former left leg as the two leg fairies shed their communal pants.

“Like hell you are,” said Lady Vigrid with a touch of derision, “Anyways, Max, the long story short is that we clan chiefs have been in the market for a new prince!”

“Prince?” choked Max.

“Yeah! Prince of the Fairies, that’s a job if I ever heard one. Just got to marry each of us queens, and we’ll take you in turns.”

The four lower fairies cheered.

Lady Vigrid knelt atop her underlings’ shoulders.

“So, Max, what do you say? In all the sacred ways, by the blessings of Cipher and the Woods, will you join us in matrimony?”

“What! No!” Somehow Max made it back to her feet, “Look, Nor… Vigrid. This is sweet. But I’m just a boy, and you’re just… five fairies in a trench coat… It just wouldn’t work out.”

Lady Vigrid nodded. “I understand,” she said, “Well, I was afraid it would come to this. That’s too bad, but it’s okay.”

“Th… thank you?”

“Mm-hm. Kidnapping’s an old tradition among our people.”

The five fairies leapt, their wings buzzing to life. Each of the four queens took one of Max’s limbs and flew hard towards the ground, driving him into the moss. Lady Vigrid landed on his chest.

“Now please, Max, don’t struggle. It’ll just make it harder for everyone.”

Max didn’t listen. He struggled with all his might, but the five fairies were stronger than their size and litheness suggested. He was pinned to the moss, moisture pushing through the back of his sweater, the fairies’ little hands pressing down on his arms. His couldn’t move.

Without a second thought, forgetting entirely that they’d been fighting the last time they’d seen each other, Max cried out for his omnipresent saviour:

“Lyra! LYYRAAAA!”

* * *

**VII**

Lyra heard her brother’s voice screaming from the highway. Heavily muffled by the forest, it was hard to tell where the call was coming from. Lyra pulled the golf cart onto the shoulder and bounced over the ditch. The trees, thick pillars in an endless asymmetrical temple of peeling papery bark, were widely spaced along this section. The cart put up an impressive display of all-terrain performance, rolling over juniper and devil’s club, handling swiftly enough between bristly saskatoon bushes. Leafy boughs and clusters of berries – coming nicely into season, she noticed – were knocked off and rained down on Lyra’s face.

“I’m coming, Max!”

When the cart could go no further towards the source of Max’s shouts, Lyra grabbed Soos’s shovel and leapt out. She ran, leaping from stick to stick, careful not to lose her footing on snags in the undergrowth.

She found Max in a small clearing, held down by small moving shapes, almost but not quite human. The twins’ eyes locked desperately.

“Lyra! Nora turned out to be a bunch of fairies!”

Fairies. Okay then. She was way off. Lyra tried to recall what the journal had said about fairies. She hadn’t read much of that page, focused as she had been on the zombie theory.

_Fairies are the little winged people who form many communities in undeveloped forest and abandoned structures around the valley… Cipher-based religion clear in cultural history but little practiced today… Matriarchal societies… Weaknesses: none known, but they have never been hostile to me…_

Lyra ran at the fairies like she would have a soccer ball if she’d ever had the coordination to have done so. A swinging kick dislodged the fairy on Max’s chest. The two on his legs leapt up and fluttered their wings fast as a hummingbird’s, shooting up at her. Lyra ducked. The fairies overshot, turned about, and made another flight at her. By this time, though, Max had stood up, throwing the fairies off his arms with a great swinging effort. He snatched a branch from the forest floor and leapt in front of his sister, slicing wildly at his attackers.

The twins stood back to back. Lyra brandished her shovel and shouted war cries. Max did the same with his branch. Together, with silently coordinated steps, they made their way back to the golf cart, spinning their weapons as they went. The fairies, recovering, drew back.

The twins leapt into the cart. Lyra turned it to reverse and stomped on the accelerator. The cart came dislodged from a juniper with a spray of mulch. Lyra turned, switched gears, and they were back off through the torn-up understory towards the highway.

As they growled up the shoulder from the ditch, Lyra dared a glance back. The fairies, and far more than five of them, were on wing, buzzing towards them like a swarm of insects. The queens had called in their clans. More were coming every moment.

The cart leapt at last to the road and shot off. Lyra smelled burning. How much of this acceleration could the thing take? How much gas did it even have?

As they sped down the highway, mercifully free of traffic, Max took stock of the cart’s compartments. He had the shovel held towards the back, aimed at the swarm of fairies emerging from the woods, but that would do little against so many of the fierce little people.

“Manual… Can of pop… Flashlight… Weed whipper… Leaf blower…”

And then the fairies were on the cart, punching at the twins with hard, circling blows. Max stood on the back compartment with the shovel, swinging away at oncoming fliers. Lyra kept up the acceleration, trying to keep out of the swarm’s heart, but the crowd was gaining. Three fairies grabbed Max’s shovel from his hands and threw it away. A half-dozen landed on the hood and jumped at Lyra. Shooing them desperately away, her foot came off the accelerator. The cart ground to a halt. There were fairies on both of the twins now, pinning them to the seats.

The fairy that had been Nora’s head flew up confidently, hands on hips.

“Cut this out, please, sugar. Won’t you marry us before we have to do something drastic?”

Max squeezed his eyes shut.

“Okay,” he said.

“Max, no! Are you nuts? You can’t…”

“Lyra… trust me on this one.”

“What?”

“Just this once, trust me. It’s for the best.”

Max’s guards fluttered up. He leapt down from the cart.

“Okay, Lady Vigrid. I’ll marry you.”

Lady Vigrid gave a coquettish smile and buzzed her wings wildly. An older fairy woman approached with a rough wooden bowl of what looked and smelled like mud mixed with saskatoon juice. Lady Vigrid closed her eyes, and the women used the concoction to draw a line on her cheekbone. She added two more peaking together above her eyebrow, making a triangle that perfectly framed her eye. Max knelt, and the same was done to him. All the while, Lady Vigrid whispered something ceremonial-sounding under her breath.

Max leaned towards Lady Vigrid.

“May I kiss the bride?” he said, “But you gotta do it properly. Eyes closed.”

Vigrid closed her eyes and leaned towards him. Max drew back and pulled the leaf blower from the golf cart behind him. Right as Lady Vigrid began to wonder how far away her groom was, he switched it on – suck setting.

The high queen’s eyes flashed open, but not in time to keep her from being drawn towards the leaf blower’s barrel. It was a wide-mouthed model, so her entire head fit in. The metal rim cut into her shoulders, raising a small ring of blood.

“Oh, that looks like it hurts. I bet you want out, eh?” he said, and switched to the blow setting.

Lady Vigrid shot out like a bullet from a rifle, spiralling through the air, wings useless. She was far enough away to be little more than a speck by the time she gained control.

Max swung the leaf blower around at the other fairies, knocking them off their feet and wings in great cutting swaths before they could get close to him. Lyra’s guards leapt up to join the fight. She sprang to the golf cart. 

“Hop on!” she called to Max. He did. Lyra punched the accelerator and they were off towards the Mystery Shack. Max stood on the back bumper, fending off fairies with the blower all the while. They must have made a curious sight indeed to the couple of oncoming motorists they swerved around along the way.

At the back of the Shack, Lyra hopped out of the car and ran to the tool shed. Soos’s leaf blower was there among the other lawn equipment. She rejoined Max with it, and they stood back to back again, newly armed with their weapons of mass defairyfication.

A couple more minutes of blowing away the oncoming army, and the queens must have gotten the picture. The fairies retreated into the forest bit by bit, until the two humans stood alone on a war-torn circle that was surely the cleanest lawn in town.

“And don’t come back!” Max shouted into the forest, “We know how to use these things!”

They laughed for a while, a laugh that started as hysterics and descended into ridiculousness, eventually trailing off to awkward silence.

Max turned to Lyra after a moment and said, “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you about Nora. I know you were just looking out for me.”

“That’s okay,” said Lyra, “We were both wrong about her – them, anyways. And you saved us back there.”

“I’m still bummed that I didn’t get my epic summer romance. I’ve heard summer flings can end badly, but I didn’t think that meant, five fairies in a trench coat.”

“Well, look on the bright side. Maybe the next one will be a vampire.”

“Aw, you’re just saying that.”

“I sure am. I don’t want to fight a vampire.”

They hugged, the standard slightly awkward sibling hug with the requisite one to three pats on the back.

* * *

**VIII**

As the twins came into the kitchen, Max wiped the wedding triangle from his eye, leaving a smear of purplish mud.

Stan took one look at them and said, “Yeesh. You two get hit by a bus or something?”

“Or something,” said Lyra, “We’re trying to get injured on the job, so we get worker’s comp instead of just not being paid.” 

Stan laughed and poked at a pot of instant casserole, “Yeah about that. I figured… I mean, nothing. I overstocked some inventory, so, uh, why don’t you both take something from the gift shop for free?”

“Really?”

“What’s the catch?”

“The catch is do it before I change my mind. Go take something.”

The twins ran to the gift shop and looked around. After a couple of minutes of browsing, Lyra decided on a blue ball cap with an outline of a spruce tree. If they were going to spend the summer chasing the supernatural, she decided, she needed to keep the sun out of her eyes. It fit her perfectly.

“What did you get?” she asked Max.

“A grappling hook!” he said, brandishing what looked like a stubby pistol with a giant three-sided fishhook on the barrel.

Why did Stan have that? Why did anyone actually make cheap grappling hooks for gift shops? This was so far the only mystery that the Mystery Shack had presented. Gravity Falls was of course another story.

Stand stood in the doorway and said, “Wouldn’t you rather have a shirt or something?”

“Grappling hook,” Max insisted, and shot it off. 

The hook went fifteen underwhelming feet down the aisle and had to be retracted manually.

* * *

**IX**

That night in the attic:

The twins lay on the floor by dim lantern-light, reading from the Journal. Crickets chirped. A bat fluttered against the shingles above, or maybe it was a fairy. The twins had decided, finally and unanimously, that, yes, this would be their summer: mysteries, monsters, puzzles. There were holes in the Journal, more than Lyra had realized, and there was only one way to fill those holes. They had backpacks and hiking boots and their trusty field guide, and they were ready for anything Gravity Falls could throw at them.

Lyra had protested when Max had taken a pen to the journal, but his notes were good ones. He added to the empty bottom of the page on fairies:

_Fairies sometimes take HUMAN BOYS as breeding stock! Yuck! Beware! Boys in fairy woods should carry a leaf blower. It is a fun and easy way to fight them off._

Sleepiness took them eventually. Lyra stowed the Journal on the Grœmblins crate, crawled into her cot and said to Max, “Can you get the light?”

He shot his grappling hook at the lantern, shattering the bulb.

“Grappling hook!”

“Nice.”

“Stan can buy us a new one. Oh! Happy Canada Day, by the way!”

“Is it July already?”

“If it’s past midnight it is.”

Lyra lit her watch. It was 12:09. They celebrated by singing half the national anthem off-key and making a few firework noises with their mouths. Then the sounds of the woodland night lulled them to sleep.

* * *

**X**

The Gravity Brewing Company, based on the other side on town, mostly made beer. The Mystery Shack couldn’t sell Gravity Beer because it didn’t have a liquor license. But along with the beer they made a kind of pop called Pitt, a mix between peach juice and cola. This, the Shack could sell. And because it was the cheapest thing available, Stan filled the vending machine in the gift shop with nothing but Pitt.

No one liked Pitt. No one bought it. That was fine with Stan, because the fewer people poked around the vending machine, the less likely one of them would hit A-1-B-C-3 on the number pad by accident.

Stan stood in front of the vending machine and wondered what he was doing there. It was 12:21. The kids had to be asleep by now. Could he keep doing this even with them here? He hadn’t been down in months. Why should anything be changed? But something about Lyra and Max’s presence, that sudden change in his life, threw things into perspective.

A-1-B-C-3.

The vending machine clicked. Stan swung it out from the wall on its hidden hinges. The corridor beyond was pitch black save where the beam of Stan’s flashlight illuminated the heavy dust in the air.

He stepped inside and pulled the secret door shut behind him. He never used to bother, but this wasn’t just his house anymore. Lyra and Max were smart kids, and curious. He would have to be extra careful.

_Nsgre guvegl lrnef vg’f onpx: gur zlfgrel va gur Zlfgrel Funpx_


	2. Book Two: the Serpent of Smuggler's Island

**I**

**July 1**

The day after they fought off a larcenous tribe of fairies with leaf blowers, Max and Lyra Pines were enjoying a lazy morning, using up Great-Uncle Stan’s ample supply of toaster waffles in a noble attempt to produce a decisive valuation of waffle toppings. They were pouring maple syrup directly down each others’ throats to test its viscosity, when Stan came into the kitchen bleary-eyed and seeking coffee.

“Guess what day it is,” he said.

It was the first of July, Canada Day. Everyone across the country was off work and likely to be relaxing at fairs and pancake brunches. There would be fireworks that night.

“I always lose track of the day on vacation,” said Lyra, “Is it Sunday?”

“It’s arbour day, of course,” said Max, “We should all wish Santa _Mazel Tov_ when he comes by.”

“It’s a national holiday, geniuses,” said Stan, “I’m closing the Shack. I was thinking we’d go fishing.”

“Fishing?” said Max.

“What’s your game, Grea’uncle Stan?” said Lyra.

“No game. Just a day in the sun, down on the river.”

While Stan made himself coffee, Lyra absentmindedly flipped through the latest _Gravity Gossiper_ , a free monthly magazine that could be found all around town: on racks in shops, piled up in waiting and living rooms, and slowly fermenting in the cracks of leaky porch roofs. It was about eighty per cent advertisements and most of the rest was interviews about real estate.

But there was something that caught Lyra’s attention. She slid the magazine away from herself and pointed it out to Max. He gasped.

“Human sized hamster balls available for rental at the aquatic centre? But I’m human sized!”

“Beneath that,” said Lyra.

The ad, only about the size of three or four postage stamps, announced a photography contest, for pictures of _the strange, the unexplained, and the unseen._

“Did you get any pictures of the fairies?” said Lyra.

“No,” said Max, “Only bruises and memories, and trace hair.”

Lyra cut out the ad and put it in her shorts pocket, so that she would have the mailing address for any photos they could take of whatever else the Journal might lead to. She was planning on running up to the attic to get it when Stan finished with his coffee, wolfed down a bagel, and excitedly hurried the twins out the door to go fishing. The morning, Stan insisted, was the best time to catch fish, before too many engines got onto the river.

Stan’s car was a well-waxed and thoroughly dented red Cadillac. The twins piled into the back seat and Stan drove them down to the river.

Downstream from where it ran through Gravity Falls’ historic downtown, the Vigrid River met with several creeks and widened to a thick, lazy stream braided with forested islands. A small public marina sat by the widest stretch. Stan claimed that he kept his boat here.

When the Stanmobile (as called by its slightly misprinted vanity plate, which read “STANLMBL”) reached the marina, it became clear that Stan’s opinion about the best fishing time was widely shared. Half the town seemed to be out, either in canoes or fly-fishing from the shoreline. An RCMP car was even parked near the marina tack shop. Stan parked as far from it as possible.

Lyra thought about the Journal, lying far away in the attic of the Mystery Shack.

“Grea’uncle Stan, why do you suddenly want to go fishing with us?” she asked.

“Don’t be like that,” said Stan, “I’ve never had fishing buddies before. The guys from town won’t go with me. They say they don’t like or trust me, whatever that means.”

Lyra had a feeling it meant exactly what it was meant to mean. Max gave her arm a helpful squeeze to keep her from saying as much.

“What a great day! Sun, water, and jokes all afternoon!” said Stan.

“But it’s not even noon,” said Lyra.

“Yeah, and we’ll be out ‘til the sun gets low, eh?”

Lyra hoped not. Even Max looked frightened at the prospect of ten hours’ worth of lame puns. They were both hoping for something interesting to happen.

It did.

An old woman, dressed in denim that looked like it’d never been washed, came stumbling out of the willows by the riverside and cried out, “I seen it! I seen it again! The Gobblewonker! Quick!”

There was a lazy rousing of the people scattered around the docks to see what the commotion was about. The old woman, undeterred, continued to rant.

“The Gobblewonker smashed up my boat to all smithereens and shimmied over to Smuggler’s Island! It had a long neck like a gee-raffe and wrinkly skin like a, like a…”

“Hey!” came a shout from the tack shop. A man was rushing out, “Mom! What did I tell you about scaring my customers!”

“But I got proof!” the old woman insisted to her son.

A fat, mustached officer got out of the RCMP car.

“Ma’am, is everything all right?” said the Mountie.

The woman shambled over and begged, “Aw, Sheriff, the donkey-spittlin’ Gobblewonker smashed up my boat…”

“I’m sure it did,” said the sheriff, tipping his hat, “Now, ma’am, why don’t we get you home? Do you need any help?” His deputy, a skinny man with big ears, wrote furiously in a notepad. The old woman shook her head and dejectedly wandered off across the parking lot.

Stan clapped a hand on each of the twins’ shoulders.

“Well, that happened,” he said, “Let’s get this boat launched.”

But Lyra wasn’t so ready to dismiss the ramblings. She hissed to Max, “’Did you hear what that old lady said?”

“Something about donkey spittle,” said Max.

“No! Something about a river monster! That’s perfect for the prize! If we can get a good picture, we can split the prize money fifty-fifty!”

“Two fifties! That’s a whole hundred!” said Max, “How much money was it again?”

“Five hundred bucks.”

“Yes! Imagine what we could do with two hundred and fifty dollars each! I wouldn’t have to rent, I could buy my own human-sized hamster ball! Lyra, I am two hundred and fifty per cent on board with this plan.”

Lyra turned to where Stan was unlocking his canoe, which looked too small to hold three people. It was called the _Stan o’ War II_ in peeling paint on the hull. “Change of plans, Grea’uncle Stan. We’re going to go get some of those cameras from the store, and then we’re taking the canoe to Smuggler’s Island for a monster hunt!”

Max chanted, “Monster hunt! Monster hunt!”

A horn honked nearby.

“You guys say something about a monster hunt?” said a familiar voice.

“Soos!”

Soos was at the captain’s chair of a sturdy-looking fishing boat with an outboard motor.

“What’s up, hambones!” said Soos, “Crazy seeing you here! You need a boat and a captain for your monster hunt?”

“We already have one,” said Max, at the same time Lyra said, “We sure do!”

Stan and Soos’s eyes locked from their respective boats, several berths away.

“Hi, Mister Pines!”

“Hi, Soos – look, kids. You could go waste your time chasing river serpents on Soos’s motorboat… Or you could settle in for a good healthy day of paddling and tying hooks. Like we planned!”

That cinched it. Twenty minutes later, the twins had their backpacks full of sunscreen, sandwiches, and disposable cameras from the tack shop, and were aboard Soos’s _SS Cool Dude_ , roaring down the glacial-azure river to Smuggler’s Island.

“You know our heading, Captain Soos!”

“Aye-Aye, skipper Max! Skipper Lyra! Hoist the flag!”

Lyra held up a beach towel to flap majestically in the wind.

“We’re going to find the Gobblewonker, and we’re going to win that photo contest! And Gravity Falls will know our names!”

* * *

**II**

Low clouds drew in as the three explorers travelled downstream, a thin haze over the river. The banks grew steeper until they were nearly in a canyon.

“So, I guess you guys are, like, the mystery twins or whatever?”

“No,” said Lyra.

Max shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. You know, last fall Lyra spent three days analyzing an entire park to figure out who might have stolen the capers from a picnic.”

“Did you ever find out?” said Soos.

“No. The whole thing was a distraction. She just ate them before.”

“I did not! And can we focus? If we want to catch this monster, we have to be smart about it,” said Lyra, “Think: what’s the first problem with most monster hunts?”

“You’re a side character and you die in the first act,” said Soos, “Dude, am I a side character? Do y’ever think about stuff like that?”

“No, no. Camera trouble! All they people who say they’ve seen a sasquatch – Soos, be a sasquatch?”

Soos struck a walking Bigfoot pose with one hand on the wheel.

“There he is!” said Lyra, and mimed patting at her fishing vest, “Aw, no camera! Wait, here’s one! Oh, no film! You see?”

Max and Soos nodded assent.

That, she explained, was why they had eight disposable cameras with them: two in her vest, one in her shorts pocket, two for each of the others, and three extras in the boat.

“Actually, I dropped one in the water while I was getting on,” said Soos.

“Right, see? That’s fine. We still have seven.”

“I spent a whole roll of one taking pictures of a heron,” said Max.

“Six!” cried Lyra, and throwing up her arms, knocking one camera off the dashboard into the river, “We still have six – five. We have five cameras.”

“So, what’s the plan, throw more cameras away?” said Max.

“No!” said Lyra, “Okay, here’s the plan. I’ll captain the expedition, Soos, keep piloting the boat, and Max, be on lookout.”

“I thought I was the captain,” said Soos.

“You’re the captain of the boat, but I’m the expedition captain.”

“Why can’t I be the expedition captain?” said Max.

“Because you leave the room whenever one of my paranormal hunting shows comes on.”

“What about co-expedition captain?”

“There is no co-expedition captain.”

Max held a camera over the side of the boat and said, “Wow, my hands are sweaty. I hope I don’t drop this.”

“Okay fine! You can be co-expedition captain! Just don’t lose the cameras!”

“Can I be associate co-expedition captain?” said Soos.

“As co-expedition captain and lookout, I authorize that station.”

Lyra stared out at the shoreline. It was fractured here, with the river cutting into channels that may have ended in eddies or continued on to make long islands, gravel bars topped with scrabbly birch woods. Judging by the steepness of the banks, it was deep, too. A monster could easily lose itself in this maze.

“Soos, do you have any fish food? I’m thinking that if we start a feeding frenzy, we can lure it in.”

Soos brought out a big bucket full of strong-smelling chalky pellets, and said, “Permission to taste some, expedition captain?”

“Uh, granted.”

“Co-granted.”

“Associate co-granted,” said Soos, and he did. Immediately he gagged and spat off the gunnel. He returned to the wheel just in time to keep _Cool Dude_ from riding the current into a gravel bar.

“I don’t know what I expected that to taste like,” he said.

* * *

**III**

Traitors, thought Stan, watching his great-niece and -nephew ride away into the mist with his handyman. Well, who needed them? There were a dozen boats on the river. He’d find his own fishing buddies, win their friendship with some jokes, and have a great day all the same. He spied a couple in a canoe drifting along the opposite banks. They looked nice. Stan cracked a beer, took a long swig, and began to j-stroke in their direction.

* * *

**IV**

Reggie rested his paddle on the gunnels and took a silent breath in. His heart was pounding. Rosanna sat in the front seat of the canoe, looking as unspeakably beautiful as ever. How could something so perfectly meant to happen be so hard? The diamond ring under his life jacket felt like the weight of the world.

“Rosanna,” he said.

She turned around, her eyes full of life. A chickadee called from the shoreline.

“Now that we’re alone,” said Reggie, “There’s a burning question my heart longs to ask you…”

Something hit the side of the canoe. A frumpy old man in another canoe had knocked into them. A suspiciously light-looking can of beer was in his hands, and he swayed in his seat.

“You guys want to hear a jo… a joaje? A joke?” said the guy, “Okay, here goes. My ex-wife still misses me… but her aim is gettin’ better!”

The canoes bumped together for a silent moment.

“I said, her aim is getting better! Her AIM is getting BETTER! Y’see, it’s, it’s funny because marriage is terrible! Hey! Where are you going?”

* * *

**V**

Smuggler’s Island was really only an island because it was bigger than the rest of the dredged-up beaches along that stretch of the Vigrid, and stable enough to hold trees without the currents changing to wash them away. _SS Cool Dude_ anchored just off the thin rocky beach, and the monster hunters stepped into the water, pants rolled up and shoes in hand. A British Columbia Waterways sign on the shoreline proclaimed the island to be a protected ecological area.

The woods here were markedly different from those surrounding the Mystery Shack. There, ferns and junipers grew between wide-spaced cedars. Here, the birches, poplars, and hardscrabble lodgepoles were more tightly spaced, but smaller.

The island was less than half a kilometre long, and much longer than it was wide. The three searchers covered the whole area in no time at all and met back at the north end where the boat was tugging at its cinderblock anchor. They’d found a week-old firepit with a blackened beer can in it, and an impressive beaver dam on the east side channel, but no monster.

“Maybe we should give this up, man,” said Soos, “I don’t even know what we’re looking for.”

“Give it up?” said Lyra, “We haven’t even started! Can you imagine what would happen if we get a set of really good, definitive pictures of the Gobblewonker?”

Lyra could. She’d been picturing it since she’d first seen the ad in the _Gossiper_. She’d have to look for a bush jacket, properly roughed up from adventuring, to wear on her TV appearances. She’d speak with suave eloquence about how she never ran from danger. Max could get some of the money from those appearances, but he wouldn’t be allowed to join her on camera. He’d probably try to show up in a human-sized hamster ball, drowning in his own sweat.

But she had to admit, the island was showing little promise. Maybe the old lady was just crazy after all.

No one said anything. So, Lyra took up her camera and lapped the island again. Again, nothing. When they met back up, she broke into a long sigh. The fog was thickening, and they were all on the verge of dampness.

“What are going to tell Gre’uncle Stan?” she said, “We ditched him over nothing.” She kicked at a couple stones before picking one up and hurling it as far towards the opposite shore as she could. It bounced off a rock and splashed into the river a pitiful distance away. Of course. Useless at monster hunting, and a poor

thrower to boot, that was all old so-called Lyra Pines was.

And then, with a growl that sent ripples splashing against the shore, the rock sunk away. A dark shadow was barely discernable under the ripples of the current. Lyra scrambled for her camera. Another grey hump – so easily mistaken for a rock – surfaced upstream, a little closer to the island. Lyra took a shot, though she couldn’t be sure she’d done it in time before the Gobblewonker was out of sight again.

Lyra swivelled to Max and Soos and cried, “Cameras, guys! Cameras!”

“Uh, dude?”

“Lyra!”

“It’s not hard, you just point and shoot and…”

She turned back around, and her mouth actually fell open.

Looming out of the fog was a quivering neck, fifteen feet high. The shape of the giant head hanging over Lyra’s own was tough to make out in the fog, but she could discern a pair of black eyes gleaming slightly in the flat light.

And then it roared. The sound was like a chainsaw. Lyra was frozen for a moment as the serpent’s head bore down on her, and then Max’s hand was on hers and pulling her along. Her legs moved, not quite walking, more stumbling to keep from overbalancing. Something clicked, and she realized she should be running. So, she did.

The three of them took off across the shoreline towards _Cool Dude_. The serpent’s head crashed onto the island and drew back up covered in twigs. It swept towards them, taking out a sapling along the way.

Lyra’s foot snagged on a root and she went sprawling, stinging gravel cutting her arms. Her camera went rolling towards the water’s edge. She pushed herself up, not noticing the big bloody patches on her forearms, intent only on salvaging the camera.

The Gobblewonker reared up out of the water, just against the steep drop right offshore. It fell down towards her, and Lyra, on her knees, had nowhere to run. She turned over with a jump, bloodying her knees now too, and scrambled wildly towards the safety of the trees. The growling head fell behind her and slid back into the river, dragging a storm of gravel with it, and the precious camera too.

Lyra felt like sobbing. But, no time for that. Soos had grabbed her in a football tackle and was dragging her towards the boat. Max had already drawn up the anchor and stood with his feet in the water, holding _Cool Dude_ against the current.

The three hopped in and sped away downstream. Soos started the motor, mercifully smooth. They dodged through gravel bars, woods flashing by on the banks.

“If it makes you feel any better, Lyra, I got some good shots of those beavers,” said Soos.

“Why would that make me feel better!” said Lyra.

Soos just shrugged. The Gobblewonker was turning about upstream. Soos pushed the throttle and _Cool Dude_ went nose-up, rattling over the water. The serpent gave chase. Lyra pulled out her other vest camera, only to find that the lens had cracked when she fell. That left the one in her shorts, which she found had also fallen out and was probably back on the island.

“Take mine!” said Soos, rolling his last camera towards her. Too hard. It went up the side of the boat and splashed over the gunnel.

The Gobblewonker was gaining on them. Up ahead, the river performed a hairpin turn against a sheer cliff, where a waterfall cascaded down. These were the very falls from which the town took its name, tumbling from a rack near the crest of what Soos called Norwich Hill. Lyra noted how improbably smooth and lustrous the cliffs were, almost like metal. Obviously it couldn’t be ore, though, or it would have been quarried away by now. This was a mining town, after all. For that matter, wasn’t that deflective angle impossible? The cliffs should have just eroded away.

A roar came from behind. Right. The monster.

“Soos! Steer for the falls! There might be a cave behind them!”

“Might be!” cried Max, but Soos obliged, steering for the plunge pool. The three leaned as the boat tilted precariously, sending their third-last camera into the water. When they were angled right at the cascade, Soos threw the throttle into reverse. The nose fell hard, sending up a blinding spray. The spray fell, and the falls rose. All sheltered their heads as the torrent fell on them harder than any monster could. Lyra’s skinned arms lost a couple more layers of flesh to the jet-like pressure. The gunnels scraped against rock, shedding splinters every which way. 

And yet, they were alive. _SS Cool Dude_ came to a slow, waterlogged stop against the rocky shoreline of a slowly eddying pool. Stone rose up on four sides to meet in heavy stalactites above. Just ahead, an underground stream fell from a fissure in the cliffside. Behind, the deafening curtain of water made a spectacular sight.

Then the curtain split. The Gobblewonker came through, head followed by sinuous neck and thicker body… and stopped. In the shallow water of the cave, it had no purchase against the slick rock, and not enough water to swim.

“It’s stuck.”

“It’s stuck?”

“It’s stuck!” shouted Lyra (everyone was shouting, because of the waterfall,) and grabbed the second-last camera. From the boat, drifting serenely in the eddy behind the falls, she had a full view of it. The serpent held its head still, almost unnaturally still. Its skin was the texture of rock, or dull metal, or stiff dirty canvas.

She framed shot after shot, took off her shoes, and waded into the chilly pool for different angles. The creature’s ribs stuck out against its blotchy skin, curiously arcing over its back. Did it have no spine? Was its spine in the front?

“Did you get a good one?” Max called from the boat.

Lyra, her legs bristling with goosebumps from the glacial water, called back, “They’re all good ones!”

Then a rock fell from the roof of the cave, landed on the Gobblewonker’s back, and ripped its skin open. There was no blood; it fell through like a knife through paper, leaving a gaping hole.

The three monster hunters fell silent. Lyra waded over, into deeper water that soaked the hems of her shorts. Soos and Max rolled up their own shorts and leapt in after her. The water rose to chest level near the monster, so Lyra hopped off the slick bottom and began to swim.

The closer she got, the more Lyra thought the Gobblewonker’s skin looked like old canvas, the sort that had sat in water, rotting, for a long time. It wasn’t patterned like scales, but rather, in a right textile grid.

Max and Soos had swum up behind her now, and the three circled the beast that was now embarrassingly obviously artificial: canvas stretched over a frame probably mounted on a canoe, and an articulated neck made of rings cut from oil drums.

On the flank of the construct, Lyra found a concealed flap in the canvas skin, held down against the hull of the canoe underneath by an array of metal snaps, rusted to the same blotchy colours as the canvas itself. She hesitated only to call the others over before planting her feet on the bottom of the pool and ripping the canvas aside.

Inside, a ragged old lady sat in the seat of the canoe, crouched beneath arcs of jerry-rigged steel ribbing. Her hair was tangled with sweat, and her clothes were sodden with water pouring out of the canvas above her head. She crouched over a set of indecipherable mechanical controls.

Lyra recognized her immediately. It was the very old bat who had first come out of the brush shouting about the Gobblewonker.

“You,” said Lyra. 

It wasn’t the sort of creative quip a proper adventurer would have come up with, but her brain had shorted out. She was seeing things, but nothing was falling together into any sort of logic. Facts flowed slow: the Gobblewonker was an amateurishly built ride-inside animatronic. Okay. But the old lady who was driving it – who had made it? – who must have made it – had herself called for the hunt.

Fortunately, Max took over and said, “Did you make this? Why?”

The old lady was stock-still, still dripping pathetically. 

“Attention,” she creaked.

“I still don’t get it,” said Max.

The old lady giggled madly, “Well first I put a tarp o’er a canoe… put in some pumps… an engine… then I made an animatronic head with four joints of two-way rotation!”

“You made a submarine, and a full animatronic sea serpent, out of a canoe?” said Lyra, dumbfounded, “That’s… well, that’s amazing. But why?”

The old lady sighed and crawled towards her. Lyra kicked up her feet and backstroked away to a safe distance as the old lady hung, gargoylesque, over the gunnel at the flap.

“My son never comes to see me anymore,” she said, “So I thought I’d catch ‘is attention with a giant aquatic robut! Hee-hee!”

Once again, Lyra had no response worthy of this statement.

“In retrospect ‘t seems a bit contrived,” said the old lady, “But ah, the lengths us old-timers go to t’ spend some time with our kiddies…”

Max gave a half-glance at Lyra. It was enough to carry the meaning. They thought about Grea’uncle Stan, drifting somewhere on the river.

“Did you ever tell your son about how you felt?” said Max.

“No m’boy, I set straight to work on the robut! I’ve built lots of robuts in m’ time! Like when m’ husband left me, I built a scary pterodactyl outta a big model plane to chase ‘im around! And then m’ buddy Ernie din’t invite me to his birthday and I made an eighty ton shame bot that wiped North Vancouver off the map!”

Lyra knew this wasn’t true but didn’t say as much.

What she did say was, “Your robot’s broken now. Do you want a ride back to the marina?”

* * *

**VI**

No one said much as the odd quartet made their way back to civilization. With the Gobblewonker half-filling the entrance to the cave, there was no way to get the _SS Cool Dude_ out. Soos kissed his boat a sad goodbye, saying that he’d come back for her before the summer was out. 

They picked their way around the remains of the canoe and out into daylight. It was an easy swim across the plunge pool to the flatter shore, even with the three youngsters supporting old lady McGasket, as she introduced herself. Lyra couldn’t be sure this wasn’t as construed a name as her “robuts.” Her torn-up limbs stung as they were washed by the cold water.

It was a long walk back to the marina, picking their way through the brush along braiding riverside deer trails. The morning fog had burned off, and the noonday sun beat down, sharp in the way that the sun only is at thin-aired mountain elevations.

Max led the pack. Lyra kept close behind her and whispered, “So much for that photo contest, eh?”

“We’ve still got a camera left,” said Max, “And you got lots of pictures in that cave.

But it wouldn’t feel right to mail in photos of the Gobblewonker now that they knew the truth of it. It wasn’t just that Lyra wanted pictures of a real monster, now that she knew they existed, though that was part of it. It would be an affront to Old Lady McGasket’s already wounded pride.

“Forget it,” said Lyra, “I wouldn’t know what to do with two hundred and fifty dollars, anyways. What do you want to do with that last camera?”

* * *

**VII**

“Kids?” said Stan, “I thought you were off playing dinosaur hunters with Soos. What are you doing back here?”

Max and Lyra stood on the farthest dock, where they’d been waiting for Stan to notice them and paddle over. They were in that state of wet clothes, dry skin, tangled hair, that persists for an hour after swimming. Lyra was beginning to sunburn along what bits of skin were still left on her forearms.

“No dice,” said Lyra, “We gave it up.”

“We realized the only wrinkly dinosaur we want to be out on the river with is right here,” said Max, smiling. His braces flashed silver in the sun.

“Save your sympathy!’ said Stan, “I’ve been having a great time without you. Making friends, talking to my reflection, paddling away from the cops. They took all my beer.”

“Well, that makes room for two more in that canoe, then?”

Stan beamed wider and more genuine than they’d seen before. The _Stan o’ War II_ was tied up to the dock and the three Pines shared a perfect lunch of soggy sandwiches and Pitt soda. 

“By the way,” said Max, “ _Stan o’ War II_ – was there a _Stan o’ War I_?”

“Never made it off the beach in New Brunswick. I’m glad to know I won’t have you guys running off into the forest on monster hunts for the rest of the summer,” said Stan.

“What!” said Lyra, “Of course we will. ‘No more monster hunts’ is just for today, right Max?”

“If you say so,” said Max, mouth full of bread.

“I do say so,” said Lyra, “Hey, Gre’uncle Stan, I’ve never threaded a hook before. Will you teach me how to do it?”

“You’re looking at a pro, kid! I could do it with my eyes closed.”

“A loonie says you can’t.”

“A toonie says you can’t, while singing at the top of your lungs,” said Max, raising the stakes.

“I’ll take that bet,” said Stan.

Lyra snapped a picture. It wouldn’t win any contests. It was carelessly framed, flatly lit, and the subject, Stan and Max sitting on the dock eating, was a lot of nothing. But she wanted to remember it all the same.

The Pines whiled away the rest of the day on the river as planned. They fished, they explored the shoreline, they cracked painfully bad jokes.

It wasn’t a perfect day, but it was pretty good.

Sometime in the afternoon, the twins leapt from the canoe and dove, synchronously, into the shimmering, icy river. They were drifting in a deep spot, right near the center of the flow. Even in the clear water, the bottom was barely discernable. But for just a moment, before she surfaced, though it may just have been a stray lock of her own hair, or a patch of bubbles from breaching the surface, Lyra thought she saw something, something like no fish she’d ever seen, moving in the depths that no covered canoe could hope to reach.

* * *

**VIII**

That night in the attic:

Fireworks shot off from the high school field, two kilometres away in town. Max and Lyra crowded by the porthole and watched them burst over and between the shivering treetops.

The shattered electric lantern had been replaced with an old-fashioned oil lamp. It painted the three planes of the room in warm, sputtering light. Every shadow had a ghostly flicker.

At the base of their cots, the twins had packed their knapsacks, ready to be grabbed for another monster hunt at a moment’s notice. Each bag had a bottle of water, a sweater, a raincoat, a toque, extra socks, a flashlight, granola bars. Lyra’s had her (proper, non-disposable) camera, the Journal, and a set of trusty pens. Max’s had a canister of bear spray and his grappling hook, which took up most of the room, despite Lyra’s insistence he’d never use it.

An enormous violet flower blossomed next to the moon. Seconds later, it was heralded with a slow-travelling bang, the human celebration call added to the triumphant evening chorus of the birds.

_01010011 01101000 01100101 00100000 01101101 01101001 01100111 01101000 01110100 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01100010 01100101 01100101 01101110 00100000 01100001 00100000 01110111 01101111 01110010 01101100 01100100 00101101 01100011 01101000 01100001 01101110 01100111 01100101 01110010 00101100 0001010 01000010 01110101 01110100 00100000 01110011 01101001 01111000 00100000 01100110 01101001 01101110 01100111 01100101 01110010 01110011 00100000 01110010 01100101 01100001 01110010 01110010 01100001 01101110 01100111 01100101 01100100 00100000 01101000 01100101 01110010 00101110_


	3. Book Three: Taken to the Max

**I**

**July 2**

One of the many quirks of Gravity Falls was its apparent invisibility to cable television companies. The only way to pick up most channels was with a satellite dish. These were fairly common on the town skyline, sharing space with spruce trees. Stately old Norwich Lodge, a log chalet on a hill to the south of town, positively bristled with them. 

But for those without, there were two channels. One was the CBC; the other was a public access station broadcast by the same company that printed the _Gossiper_.

Max and Lyra had initially had little interest in any of this. But when they mentioned to Soos that they hadn’t watched TV since arriving in Gravity Falls, he guffawed.

“Man, you guys don’t know what you’re missing out on,” he said.

“Is it that good?” said Max.

“Good? No. It’s terrible. But it’s, like, an experience.”

“Remember that peer pressure ad the cops made?” Wendy put in. “That was sure something. _You can avoid trouble with these simple words…”_

Soos joined her in reciting, “ _Uh-uh! No-No! Bippity-bop kazow! I can’t be pressured, no way, no how!”_

So, the three of them crowded onto the couch in Stan’s living room to watch something Soos called Ducktective.

“Ducktective?” said Lyra.

“Just watch,” said Soos.

Ducktective turned out to be exactly what it said on the tin: a duck detective. 

“No one knows exactly who makes this show,” said Soos, “But it’s someone in town with a pet duck.”

Indeed. Said duck was filmed dressed in a custom-made tiny trench coat. It quacked on cue, and when it did, the quacks were subtitled as detective-like dialogue. In this way, the duck played the central role in a cast of more human, less talented actors, in a hyper-low-budget mystery series.

Soos was right. It was an experience.

“And just wait for the commercials,” he said.

But rather than the shouting and shaky camera shots of local businesses the twins expected, the screen went dark after the last of the Ducktective credits. Even Soos looked puzzled. Soft piano music played, as an image faded in of a young man standing in misty woods, lost in solemn expression.

“The future may be dark,” whispered a man’s voice, a hint of a Texan accent, “Debts, death, disaster. What’s darker than the unknown?”

In an instant, the levity was gone from the room. Despite the July heat, Lyra shivered.

“But fear no more,” said the commercial, and the camera panned about the sorrowful man, “For Delilah’s here…”

The man stood now in front of a vast white tent, somehow ecclesiastical, pitched on a lawn in a clearing, fluttering in an unheard breeze. The production was slick, too slick for Vigrid Regional Public Access Television.

Delilah. Who was Delilah? The TV showed dimly lit shots of tarot cards passed over by feminine hands, crystal balls, a single ice-blue eye.

“Delilah is North America’s most admired psychic visionary. The future is within reach. All things can be made clear, with Delilah. Waste no more time with frauds who call themselves men of mystery. Seek the truth. Delilah is waiting.”

The ad faded, to be replaced with more amateurish content. But the twins were too curious to be captivated by comically bad TV anymore.

“Now _that_ seems like an experience,” said Max, “I wonder if it’s real? I mean… If fairies are real…”

“Don’t get too curious,” said a gruff voice.

The twins turned around. Gr’uncle Stan had appeared in the living room, apparently at the sound of the TV. He was still dressed in his Mister Mystery getup, eyepatch, fez, and all.

“Ever since that witch rolled into town, I’ve had nothing but trouble,” said Stan, “She bought out all my ad spots in the tourist brochures at twice the price I paid for them. Her people paved my favourite creek for tour bus parking. She’s got it in for me, for some reason.”

“Is she psychic?” said Max.

“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” said Stan, collapsing into his recliner, “And you shouldn’t either.”

Max and Lyra exchanged winks, but not subtly enough to escape Stan’s notice.

“I saw that,” he said, “I forbid you from patronizing my competition. No one who lives under my roof is stepping foot under…” he spat the name, “ _Delilah_ ’s roof. Final word.”

They didn’t speak of it again until they were safely sequestered in the attic.

“We’re not allowed to step under Delilah’s roof,” said Lyra then, “But that doesn’t even make sense. It’s a tent. Tents don’t have roofs.”

Max nodded sagely, and then broke into a brace-filled grin.

“I think we just found our loophole,” he said.

_Seek the truth. Delilah is waiting…_

* * *

**II**

Delilah’s Tent of Telepathy was easily found from following signs. They were big, glossy billboards on steel posts, nothing like the rough wooden arrows Lyra had nailed up to point to the Mystery Shack.

Past an entrance gate at the road, a path led through the woods. White banners hung from the trees, emblazoned with five-eyed pentagrams. Lyra wanted to stop and examine the curious symbology, but Max pushed on heedless. The tent itself was even grander and more ceremonious than the fuzzy commercial had implied, standing alone at the centre of its manicured glade.

The twins forked over five dollars admission each – cash only, slid into a transparent box for the obvious purpose of the box being impressively full of blue and purple. Gr’uncle Stan would have been proud.

In fact, the whole setup seemed like a bizarre version of the Mystery Shack from a parallel world. While Stan embraced an aesthetic of shadowy mountain woodiness, the Tent of Telepathy was awash with light and spotlessly clean. Rows of wooden seats faced a bedazzled stage.

While Max scanned the crowd, Lyra made note of the banners that hung here too. A pastel pentagram, and in each of the five triangles at the stars’ points, an open eye. She hadn’t seen the symbol before, but something about it felt familiar in a recent sense. Not the star, but rather the eyes.

The tent was surprisingly packed for a Monday morning, even in summer. The Pines took a pair of seats on the end of an aisle. Many of the patrons were obviously tourists, but there were locals scattered among them, including the Mounties they’d seen at the river yesterday.

The fairies. That was why the symbol seemed familiar – the eyes within the triangles looked like Max’s eye after the fairy queen had drawn a triangle over it. What had she said then? _By the blessings of Cipher and the woods_ … And there was something in the Journal about that, too, an eye in a triangle at the center of a wheel of symbols. Lyra filed away the connections in her mind.

After a few minutes, the flaps of the tent fell, cutting out some of the daylight. A jaunty piece of synthesized organ music began to play. Time to see what this witch, so hated by Stan, looked like.

Spotlights played on the stage’s silk curtains, illuminating the distorted outline of an approaching figure. In the hush, they could hear the click-clack of high heels. The curtains parted, and Delilah was revealed.

She threw her arms out and cried, “Hello, Gravity Falls!”

The crowd cheered. Max and Lyra looked on dumbstruck, leaned together to whisper at each other:

“What! That’s Stan’s great rival? Her?”

“But she’s so little.”

“What is she, twelve?”

“What’s with her hair? That’s not just blonde, that’s, like…”

“I think she’s an albino. Look at her eyes, too.”

“She’s kind of cute,” said Max.

“You think she’s pretty? I can see why you would, but…”

“What? No! She’s _cute_ , like a doll baby. I wouldn’t… You think she’s pretty?”

“In a weird way,” said Lyra, “She does kind of look like she could eat you.”

Delilah bounced across the stage, soaking in the applause with a precocious smile. It was hard to pin down exactly how old she was. Her plump face was that of a child, younger than the twins; but the way she wore her heels and dress, jean jacket and sparking bolo tie, the way her hair was piled up on her head like an old-fashioned movie star, the way she surveyed the crowd… All these things flew in the face of that assessment.

As the crowd quieted, Delilah raised one tiny hand and said, with just a touch of a Texan accent, “Ladies and gentlemen… Ladies and gentlemen… It’s such a gift to have you all here tonight, yes, such a gift. I have had a vision! I see that you will all gasp in amazement.”

Delilah jumped, clicking her heels together and landing in a showy pose. Impressed noises rose from the crowd.

“It came true,” whispered Max. Lyra wasn’t so impressed.

“Hit it, daddy!” Delilah called to a man at an electric organ. He struck up a jazzy show tune, and Delilah began to sing.

“ _OHHHH I can see what others can’t see,_

_It ain’t some sideshow trick, it’s innate ability_

_Where others may be blind, I am future-ly inclined_

_And you too could see, if you was little old me!”_

“Rise up, y’all, rise up! Keep it going! Rise up!”

Delilah punctuated her rise-ups with lofting hand gestures. The crowd went to their feet, and the twins found, without ever making the decision to, that they were standing along with them. Lyra tried to sit down, but as soon as she did, she was standing again.

The crowd began to clap along with the beat of the song. Delilah danced off the stage and into the wide aisle between two sections of seats. She scanned the crowd, laying her hands on select people.

“You wish your son would call you more,” she said to an older lady, and rhymed it with, “I sense that you’ve been here before!” to a man across the aisle.

She carried on, making these brief, easily implied predictions about the audience. As she approached the twins, Delilah said into her mic set, “Can I get a volunteer?”

Max’s hand shot up. Delilah bounced over to him and said, “This young man! What’s your name? No, don’t say… I can see it! Maxi… Maximilian! You look more like Max-a-million bucks, to me!”

The crowd laughed. Max flushed and followed Delilah to the stage. It was all so quick, Lyra never had time to protest.

Max and Delilah took the stage. She circled him, like a chubby vulture waiting on its prey, as he stood stock-still.

“Now, Maxim, I see that you’re here with a young lady tonight. Your girlfriend?”

Lyra was suddenly blinded. The spotlight had been pointed in her direction. She shrunk away, evoking harsh laughs from the crowd.

“My sister,” Max squeaked. For all his typical confidence, Max suffered from stage fright even more than Lyra.

“Sister!” cried Delilah, “Well, I’m glad to know you’re still available, handsome young man! And what’s your sister’s name? I see… The night! The sky! Stars, yes, a constellation name…”

Lyra tensed. Could she really know that? She and Max had been talking enough that Lyra might have used his name, and had it overheard, but she didn’t think he’d used hers.

Delilah continued her faux-mystic searching. “A sign on the zodiac! Virgo, no, Libra! Your sister’s name, Maximilian, is Libra, yes?”

“Lyra,” said Max. The audience cheered, but why? Delilah had gotten it wrong. Lyra saw that she knew this, too. A dash of anger showed through her cheerful persona, just for a moment.

“Well, what’s a B between friends, right, Max?” Delilah said, and waved her hands about making bee buzzes. The crowd loved it. “But more about you. You’re new in town… Just this last week. A new job! Somewhere with the smell of…” she inhaled deep, “Cedar wood and cheap cleaning supplies! And the smell of deception… lies and rip-offs. I see you dwelling in a place where claims of great power are the lies of a foolish old man. You don’t work at the bank, do you, Max?”

“No,” said Max, “I work at the Mystery Shack.”

“Stanford Pines’ place! That would explain it!”

Laughs. Boos. Delilah accepted these, even adding a chuckle of her own. For all that she was no fan of the Mystery Shack herself, Lyra felt her neck grow hot.

Over several minutes, Delilah trotted out more almost-truths, just enough to leave Max stunned. He’d had a girlfriend and lost her, just a few days ago. He liked key lime pie, especially the graham crumb crusts. He was a fan of romantic comedies, but only the actually funny kind. He sewed his own designs onto the sweaters he wore.

By the time Max sat back down, and Delilah had taken her next volunteer, Lyra knew something was up.

The greatest tool of a fake psychic’s trade is the psychological Forer Effect. There are certain statements that are true about pretty well everyone. And everyone, being egotistical, is apt to believe that these generic statements are specific to them. But there was a problem with that. Delilah’s readings on Max had been mostly, but not entirely, Forer statements. Sewing one’s own sweater fronts definitely wasn’t the sort of thing you’d find in a newspaper horoscope. Another trick is subjective validation, leading the volunteer with generic hints that they, eager to show off, leap right into clarifying. But Max hadn’t validated. Crippled by stage fright, he’d just stood and squeaked while Delilah rambled on.

Lyra didn’t want to conclude that it was magic, but then again, she would never have concluded that Nora was five fairies in a trench coat. This was Gravity Falls. Trust no one.

Eventually, after several more volunteers, Delilah called it quits with a declaration of, “Thank you! I love you! You people are the real miracle!”

And, curtain.

On exit, the guests were all given souvenir pins, oddly thick bits of metal molded into the five-eyed star. Lyra had seen some of the guests to the Mystery Shack wearing those and wondered where they’d come from. As the crowd filtered back out into the field, Lyra said to Max, “No wonder Stan’s jealous. That girl’s an even bigger fraud than him.”

But she said this to comfort herself. There _was_ something strange about Delilah.

As they passed into the parking lot, they spied a stretched white SUV emblazoned with Delilah’s pentagram.

“Now that’s a level of ostentatious even Stan wouldn’t touch,” said Lyra. The limo was so big for such a little girl. How could she even fill it? They tried to peer in, but the windows were tinted almost solid black.

“Her dance moves were adorable,” said Max.

“You’re too easily impressed.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Race you back to the Shack?”

Max closed his eyes and stuck out a hand, imitating Delilah. “Yes, I see it… I see it… It’s me beating you!”

“I think you need to check your spirits,” said Lyra, and took off running down the road, Max close behind.

* * *

**III**

Lyra sprawled on the living room couch, flipping through the Journal. She was right about the triangular eyes. One of the very first pages in the book showed just that: an eye in a triangle, surrounded by a wheel of odd symbols. Two of these, Lyra recognized: a six-fingered hand, as on the Journal’s cover, and a pentagram just like Delilah’s logo. The diagram filled much of the page, and there was no explanation, no carefully inked words detailing whatever phenomenon was recorded. This was unique to that page. In the rest of the book, text, even rotted and illegible text, outweighed the image.

Lyra thought about Delilah’s five-eyed pentagram, and the one crowding the eye in the Journal. Could they be connected? How? There was no proof that they were. Correlation wasn’t connection.

As for the rest of the symbols – a snowflake, a broken chain, a pair of spectacles – she had no idea what they could signify.

Lost in thought, Lyra barely noticed when someone knocked on the door from the gift shop. Max answered. Standing there, somehow, was Delilah.

“It’s little ol’ you!” said Max.

Delilah’s pale eyes skittered about the room.

“Yeah, my song’s quite catchy,” she said, so softly that Max barely recognized it in contrast to her booming stage voice, “Now, I know we haven’t formally met, Maxim, but after my show this morning, I couldn’t get your laugh out of my head.”

“Oh,” said Max, a little perturbed, and laughed nervously, “You mean, like, that one?”

“Yes!” she whispered, “Enchanting! Absolutely enchanting!”

“Is someone at the door?” came a shout from upstairs.

“Yesn’t, Gr’uncle Stan,” Max called back.

“I appreciate your keeping this clandestine,” said Delilah,

“Stanford’s no great fan of me. Such a sour lemon, I don’t know how he could be related to a peach so sweet.”

Max blushed, but thought, clandestine? Who said _clandestine_ out loud?

“I can’t be around long,” said Delilah, “I must be off to change for my next show. You’d love my dressing room, Max. There’s enough material in there to make a lifetime’s worth of sweaters.”

Max tensed, tempted by this. He’d been wondering how he’d get through the summer with only the couple sweaters he’d packed (the tiger one, the llama one, the Frankenstein one, and the one with his name in hieroglyphics). He’d been expecting Stan to have a sewing kit, so he could pick up some blank sweatshirts from a thrift shop for a new supply.

“Well?” Delilah winked.

Max shifted on his heels. He looked from Delilah to Lyra, and back. Then he gave Lyra a what-can-you-do shrug and started out the door.

“Max… What are you doing?” Lyra hissed.

But he was already gone.

* * *

**IV**

Max reappeared late in the afternoon, picking at his fingers. Lyra was facing inventory in the gift shop, on Stan’s orders, when she saw him.

“You look like a wolverine,” she said gesturing at Max’s hands, “Are those, like, acrylic?”

“Yeah,” said Max, knocking the fake nails against a shelf, “Delilah liked them. I’ve been trying to pick them off all the way home. I don’t know what this glue is. Have you got any nail polish remover?

He knew very well that Lyra had never worn nail polish in her life.

“You could try Soos. He might have some anti-adhesive stuff.”

“Or,” Max shrugged, “I could just keep them. She knows style better than I do, right?”

“Maybe. I don’t trust anyone whose hair is bigger than her head.”

Max flicked at a bobblehead. “Why have you got it out for Delilah, anyways? I had fun hanging out with her. It was like having a little sister. I’m not ashamed to admit it, it’s fun to have someone to do some kinda girly stuff with sometimes.”

“What – I’m a girl, if you hadn’t noticed!”

“Yeah, but, like, barely.”

The worst part about that rebuttal was that Lyra couldn’t even argue with it. Instead, she just turned away and finished aligning a row of snow globes.

“By the way…” Max pushed his hands to his hips to show off his new sweater. It was red, with a shooting star emblazoned across the front in different colours of felt.

“Okay. I’m glad you had fun. But you’re not going to see her again, eh?”

“Well…”

“You’re not!”

“She invited to go on a walk around the mill tomorrow.”

Lovely, thought Lyra. Sharp saws and heavy logs. A perfect second date.

* * *

**V**

**July 3**

The next morning, the twins set out from the Shack together, so as not to rouse Stan’s suspicion. They came to the road that cut off towards the mill, and Lyra bid Max farewell. She had decided that rather than sulk about the Shack worrying for Max, she would take her Journal on a hike up Snake Creek and hunt for Kushtaka.

“Kush what?” said Max.

“Water demons, otter spirits,” Lyra explained, “The Journal and native legend says they exist. I want to see one.”

“What’s the wire for?” Max pointed to a coil of metal Lyra had sealed in a jam jar.

“Supposedly they’re vulnerable to copper.”

“Oh… that could be why the Haida used copper shields! I always figured it was just because they’re shiny and impressive and strong.”

Lyra looked impressed at this deduction. Why was she always so surprised that he knew his history?

They parted ways. Max enjoyed the solitude of walking up the hill on the mill road, with birds chirping and sun slanting through the cedar boughs. He met Delilah near the gate to the mill itself, and they set off on a side trail. Max had an eerie recollection of Nora; but Delilah was wearing a short-sleeved dress hemmed above her knees. It would have been hard to hide any sort of paranormal creature dressed like that. What’s more, she skipped along with coordination that said, yes, she was human, and this was her real body. And she was so small that it was hard to feel threatened by her, whatever Stan and Lyra thought.

As they walked, they talked about each others’ summers so far. It was Delilah’s second summer in Gravity Falls; she’d been touring with her act since she was ten and had fallen in love with the town. Max tried to tell her about moving into the attic of the Shack, but she listened with the bored face of someone being told things she already knew. Right. Psychic. She probably knew more about Max already than he did about himself.

As they came around to one of the big mill buildings, the fence ending against its wall, Delilah said, “This is why I wanted to come here.” The warehouse roof was low-sloped and opposed a steep hill. From a thick log stretching out towards it, it was a short jump onto the roof. Max followed Delilah across the gap and they scrambled to the gable ridge. The thrum of power saws vibrated through hot asphalt shingles.

From the rooftop, they could look down the hill towards town. Gravity Falls looked like a little grid of board game pieces threaded through with the parallel curves of the river and the highway, framed by mountain ridges, overlooked by Norwich Hill and Pyramid Peak. Delilah had brought a pair of tiny binoculars, and they passed them back and forth. Delilah pointed out town landmarks: “There’s the courthouse, see the little tower? And the church just north of it? And that mountain with all the cut trails is the ski hill, you can see the chairlifts. Do you ski, Max?”

“No.”

“Hm.”

They reclined on their hands, gazing up at the clouds pushing over the mountain headwalls. Delilah looked back down at the town.

“You know, Max, when I’m up here, I feel like I’m the queen of all I survey. I guess that makes you my prince!”

“I guess,” Max smiled. It was a beautiful view. “Thanks for showing me this place. You’ve been really nice to me.”

“I can’t help it,” Delilah smiled back, “I’m speaking from the heart.”

“From the where-now?”

Delilah gave a sigh too mature to be coming from her young mouth. “Max,” she said, and leaned into his shoulder, “I’ve never felt this close with anyone. So, so close.” She stroked his sweater sleeve unnervingly.

Max pushed her hand away. “Look, Delilah, I, uh…”

She stroked his head, giggling in a way that reminded Max just how young she was.

“I like you too, but let’s just be friends, okay?”

“Give me a chance,” Delilah whispered, drawing an arm around his shoulders. Her eyes, the colour of glacier water, met his. “Dinner tonight. You know the Trout Hatch Bistro, down by the river?”

“No.”

“Well, you will. You’ll love it. My treat. Just one dinner, I swear it on my lucky bolo tie.” She touched a hand to the jeweled broach strung through the collar of her dress.

“Well… okay. Dinner. The Trout Hatch.”

Delilah squealed in delight and hugged Max tight.

“Oh, Maximilian Pines, you’ve made me the happiest girl in Canada!”

Not long later, a man shouted at them to get off the roof. Delilah crawled over and stared down at the miller, perched on the eavestrough like an albino gargoyle.

“I’m just showing my boyfriend the view,” she said sweetly.

“Oh… Miss Delilah! I’m so sorry,” the miller stammered, and rushed off.

“Daddy owns the mill,” Delilah explained, returning to Max’s side, “So they wouldn’t dare tell me what to do. Not one of them would even dare.”

* * *

**VI**

“You said yes?”

“It’s one dinner, Lyra. It’s not like I agreed to marry her. It’s not even a date as in a date. I just… Didn’t want to hurt her feelings.”

“You’ll have to eventually.”

“Yeah, right. I’m not that lovable.”

“I can agree with that.”

Max had finally managed to get rid of his odd fake nails, and a few cubic millimetres of flesh along with them.

“Hey Lyra?”

“Yeah?”

“No stalking me this time, okay?”

Lyra had no interest in doing so.

“By the way,” said Max, “Did you ever find your otter people?”

“No, but tracks!” said Lyra, “I’m going back tomorrow. Enjoy your date.”

“It’s not a date,” said Max.

Delilah showed up at seven, as planned. Max stood on the lawn, waiting for a car, when a horse, a well-groomed gray mare, trotted up onto the lawn. The psychic sat side-saddle in a riding jacket and woolen skirt. She offered a hand down to Max to mount.

“A night of enchantment awaits you, Mr. Pines!”

“Oh, boy,” said Max, “I figured we would take your limo.”

“I don’t use the limo for personal affairs,” Delilah said. Max wanted to ask, well then, what do you use it for? Driving to palm readings?

He mounted the horse with great difficulty, falling off twice.

* * *

**VII**

The Trout Hatch was all wood and fishnets, perched half over the river on stilts and encircled with a wide patio of dancing fire pits and lounge tables. It was only a semi-formal place by city standards, but for Gravity Falls it was the height of deluxe.

Delilah’s horse was tied up on the patio itself, not far from where Max and Delilah were seated. They had the table furthest out, charmingly mellow with the sound of running water and the sight of pine forest across the water. Lanterns hung overhead. Since their arrival, Max had been waiting for someone to tell them to move the animal. No one had. “People have a hard time saying no to me,” Delilah said with a wink when he brought it up. 

As if to demonstrate, she threw her legs up on the length of her booth seat, leaving a spot of mud on the cushion. It was a gesture of casual elegance, yet another that seemed to belong to a much older woman. She didn’t move or even make eye contact when the waiter came to top up their water.

Max glanced down at his table setting. He’d never seen so many kinds of forks. Even the water was effervescent, popping off his braces. What to order in a place like this? Not soup. He’d had enough of that over the last few days. It had become Mystery Shack tradition for the three Pines to shift out making dinner every night. Stan was fond of big chunks of meat grilled to very specific colours. Lyra always cracked a cookbook to some elaborate casserole or stir fry and fell into panic when half the ingredients were missing. Max made soup, because you could put anything in soup and it would still be soup

He ended up ordering an avocado burger. He wasn’t quite sure what Delilah ordered - something with a French name, bits of chicken and oddly shaped pasta.

At least Max didn’t have to worry about being strapped for conversation topics. This wasn’t usually a problem for him, but something about Delilah’s icy, almost unblinking eyes, her ghostly pallor, her sophisticated demeanor, rattled his brain too much to keep words flowing. Delilah never stopped talking about herself: shows she’d done, fans she’d met, predictions she’d made that had driven audiences to tears.

As the waiter finally, finally came to take their plates, Delilah reclined and said, “You know, Max, this was a great evening. But I know tomorrow will top it in every way.”

Max sat bolt upright. “Hang on. You said one date. One.”

Delilah sighed, “Please, Maxi, forgive a girl for being so helpless to promise. There’s a concert at Station Park tomorrow, and I’d be so pleased if you’d join me there.”

He suddenly became aware that the tables around them had filled in, and nearly all of the patrons were silent, leaning slightly towards them. Max’s eyes fixed on an old woman, sitting alone. There was a voyeuristic eagerness in her eyes, a yearning for the sight of young love. If he said no, the old woman would probably die of sadness.

* * *

**VIII**

“And you said yes? AGAIN?” said Lyra.

“Yes, I said yes!” said Max, “I didn’t want to, but she’s like quicksand! Chubby quicksand! I said yes, and you would have too – you know, if you were on a date with a girl for some reason.”

Max paced the attic, stood at the darker, dustier end away from the window, and tapped his foot on the floorboards.

“I just don’t know how to say no to her.”

“With your mouth, Max. It’s one syllable. N-O. No.”

“But I do like her! As a friend, slash little sister. I just wish she saw it that way, too.”

Max fell onto his cot. Lyra sat up on her own and reached out to give him a pat on the shoulder.

“Hey,” she said, “Do you want me to do it?”

“Do what?”

“Break up with her. I could meet her tomorrow and just tell her.”

“You’d do that?”

“Yeah. It wouldn’t be so bad coming from me, right?”

Max rolled over to look at his sister.

“Thank you,” he said.

* * *

**IX**

**July 4**

It wouldn’t have been a great day for an outdoor concert, anyways. Grey clouds obscured the mountaintops, turning the valley pale and threatening to break into rain at any moment. Delilah, however, was prepared for this eventuality. Lyra found her sprawled beneath a large umbrella near the bandstand, happily snacking from a picnic basket.

“Hello!” said Delilah when she saw her, “You’re Max’s sister! Lila, wasn’t it? You look well.”

“Thanks,” said Lyra, “We need to talk. Max won’t be here today.”

“Oh,” said Delilah, “Is he sick? That’d be a shame.”

“No, he’s fine. But he doesn’t want to see you anymore. He doesn’t think this relationship could work out.”

Delilah stared at the empty bandstand. “So, you’ve decided to come between us,” she said. One pale eye twitched slightly.

“I guess,” said Lyra, “You’re not going to freak out, are you?”

Delilah stared more intently, as if she could incinerate the gazebo with a glare. She blinked twice and looked up at Lyra.

“Of course not! These things happen. Bygones, you know?”

“Great.” Lyra flashed her a pair of thumbs up, turned them into a pair of finger guns, then back to thumbs, backing away all the while. “Cool. See you around, okay? We’re good?”

“Yes,” said Delilah, forcing a smile, “We’re good. All good.”

Lyra broke into a jog and ran to where Max hid in the lee of a building.

“How’d she take it?”

“Tough to say. She’s cryptic at the best of times.”

“I know what you mean. But did she seem mad? Did she try to erase your mind with her psychic powers?”

“No,” Lyra said as they set off. A few stray droplets of invisible rain announced themselves on the back of her hand. “I’m telling you, she doesn’t have psychic powers. And there’s no way to erase someone’s mind.”

Brush streaks flowed into the valley bottom far away. The wind was blowing them their way. Despite this, the mood lightened as the twins made their way back to the Shack. Finality on a problem like Delilah had a way of lightening the air, clearing it so that the rain could blow right over the way this whole issue had.

The rain did come, thought, pattering on the road by the time they got in. Lyra’s plans to return to return to her Kushtaka hunt were postponed. The woods, enticingly mysterious most of the time, were now just oppressive enough to make the cushioned Muskoka chairs on the dry gift shop porch the coziest place in the world. The twins huddled under blankets there with mugs of hot chocolate and counted seconds between lightning and thunder.

This tranquility was interrupted when Stan called Lyra inside to answer the phone. She shrugged at Max and gave him her blanket. Neither of the twins had been called on the Shack’s number yet.

“Hi,” said Lyra.

A man coughed on the line. “Hello, Miss Pines? This is Toby Terrazzo, from the _Gravity Gossiper_.”

“Oh. Hello.”

“Our August issue is going to feature an article on strange mysteries around town. I called your uncle because that’s his business, but he tells me you’re a real expert.”

Stan had said that? After shrugging her off every time she’d mentioned the supernatural? Maybe he was coming around.

“I guess that’s true,” said Lyra.

“Would you do an interview?”

“Yes!” said Lyra, “I’ve got all sorts of theories I want to talk about!”

“Perfect! That’s exactly what we need. I’m at the mill right now doing a piece on local industry. I know the Mystery Shack is close by. Would you like to meet me here? It’d be easier than going to the office downtown.”

Lyra glanced out at the rain. Any minute it could turn to hail, and there was no telling how long it would last.

“I’ll be right over,” she said.

* * *

**X**

Pulling off her dripping hood, Lyra stepped into the sawmill’s employee break room. Hair clung to her dripping temples, her bangs poured rivulets over her eyes, and her boots were soaked through. At least it hadn’t hailed.

The room was simply furnished, tables and chairs among crates of cut wood. A door led to a catwalk overlooking a courtyard full of lumber pallets, conveyor belts, and big industrial saws. All were shut down for the storm. Even the workers had vacated. How, and why? It’d take a big order to clear out the mill, probably right from the top. Or the secret top of the top – the owner’s daughter. Of course.

The door swung open and there she was, twirling an umbrella.

“Hello, Lyra,” Delilah said.

“Where’s the reporter guy?” said Lyra.

“Toby? Oh, I love that greedy idiot. He’ll take cash to call anyone with any script and then forget about it the next day.”

“Ah.”

Delilah stepped in and folded her umbrella. She raised a hand to the gem in her bolo tie and rubbed it pensively.

“How long have you been living in this town, Lyra? A week? Two weeks? You like it here? Love the mountain air?”

“Cut the drama. Why did you bring me here?”

“Drama’s the whole business,” said Delilah, “I just do it a bit better than some codger with a fake eyepatch.” She fixed her eyes on Lyra, “I’ve got drama enough to have countries cheering my name. And I gave that up to pitch a tent in this hick town. Why do you think I did that?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care. You love the mountain air.”

“This town has secrets, girl, secrets you couldn’t begin to understand.”

Yes, it did. Lyra knew that, and it frightened her sometimes, but she wasn’t going to let Delilah see that.

“Is this about Max? I told you. He’s not into you.”

“Liar!” Delilah shrieked, stamping a foot, gripping her tie even harder, “He was my peach dumpling, and you took him from me!”

“Hey… Are you okay?” said Lyra. 

And then the world turned upside down.

Lyra hit something hard. She’d fallen to the floor and was on her back. No, her front, but the floor was on her back. She stared up, disoriented, and realized she was looking _down_ at the floor. She was pinned to the ceiling, held there by an invisible tether. Delilah stared up from below, rubbing the amulet in her bolo tie. Magic, of course, though Lyra had read nothing like this in the Journal. Delilah caressed her stone of power, ever the showy sorceress. A flick on its polished surface, and Lyra felt a sudden drop, a wave on a roller coaster. She bounced up, rather, down, towards the floor, just for moment. Then she was pinned back to the ceiling as once again gravity reversed, or broke, or… Gravity fell. Despite her circumstances, Lyra choked out a laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Delilah said, “Never mind. See now? Reading minds ain’t all I can do.”

The spell broke. Lyra fell to the floor, hard, bruising a hip and breaking the scabs on her arms. She pushed herself half up, leaving a few streaks of blood on the linoleum.

“But you’re a fake,” she said.

“Tell me, Lyra, is this fake?”

A quick rub of the amulet, and Lyra shot towards the open door. She hit the railing of the catwalk overlooking the mill and was dragged over it. She came to a stop hanging sideways in midair over the massive table saws below. Rain beat down on her upper half. She stared at Delilah through a sodden curtain of her own hair. Delilah stood inside, safely out of the storm, and fiddled with her bolo tie to send Lyra turning slowly, a pig on a spit, to soak on all sides.

“Gr’uncle Stan was right!” Lyra shouted to her, “You are a witch!”

“No shame in that,” Delilah called back.

Lyra was suddenly aware of the saws below. Even with the machines turned off, there were enough open blades down there to mince her whole body.

“You think Max is gonna date a murderer _,_ then?”

“No,” said Delilah, “But he’ll need someone to hold him while he cries off the memory of his poor sister, who had to go out on a slippery deck over a saw blade in the rain.”

Lyra’s slow rotation had turned her face-up now. Her hands were locked to her sides, unable to block the rain from blurring in her eyes and pouring into her throat. Her hair wrapped across her face, hanging into her gasping mouth. Delilah didn’t even need to let go, didn’t need the saw. Lyra was going to drown right here, fifteen feet above it.

And then she was sideways again, facing back towards the two figures on the balcony – the _two_ figures.

Lyra had never been so happy to see another person in her life.

“Delilah,” said Max, akimbo in the rain, “We need to talk.”

Delilah blinked and stepped back into the building. “Maxy, my marshmallow,” she said, hiding the amulet in a pudgy fist, “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see my sister,” he said, “And I can’t be your marshmallow. I need to be honest with everyone here.”

“Max!” Lyra tried to cry. Delilah gripped her amulet, and Lyra slammed against the outside of the railing.

“But we can still be makeover buddies, right?” said Max.

“Really?” said Delilah.

Max put his hands on Delilah’s shoulders and gently pulled her outside. The downpour fell on them together. He took her free hand in his and caressed it. Forgetting Lyra, Delilah dropped her amulet and clasped Max’s hand in both of hers.

“No! Not really! You were attacking my sister! What the hell!”

Max snatched at the amulet and ripped it from her neck. He tore himself away from Delilah and dove towards the courtyard. Amulet in one hand, he hauled Lyra over the railing and dropped her on the catwalk. It all took the space of a moment. Gravity was back to normal. Shaking, Lyra got to her feet. The metal was dangerously slick. She braced against the rail next to Max as the two squared off against Delilah.

With a howl of rage, the psychic rushed at Max. He thrust out the amulet and Delilah flew backwards in a flash of light, rolling head over heels.

“What was that!” said Lyra.

“Magic, I guess,” said Max, hyperventilating. He poised himself and walked up to Delilah, sprawled on the break room floor. He put out his hand, amulet clasped tight, and let it fall to the floor. Delilah crawled for it.

Max was wearing his good hiking boots. The soles were thick rubber, with little steel studs embedded to grip on ice and mud. His heel came down on the amulet, precisely aimed so that one of the studs struck it in the center. The stone shattered with a pitiful crunch.

“Listen, Delilah. It’s over. I will never, ever date you. Is that clear? Come on, Lyra, let’s go home.”

Lyra was perfectly willing to limp in Max’s wake as he strode off into the storm for the Mill’s exit. Delilah came to her feet as they left.

“This isn’t over!” she cried, “This isn’t even begun! This isn’t the last you’ll see of little old me!”

The twins didn’t even turn to look at her.

* * *

**XI**

That night in the attic:

There’s a paradox that after getting caught in the rain, the first thing you want to do is have a shower. Logically, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. But there’s a universe of difference between cold water, boots, and stiff raincoats; and warm water, slippers, and soft pyjamas. Lyra was thoroughly enjoying the latter set of feelings as she slipped into bed. If only her arms weren’t so itchy. She’d plastered them with band-aids again, at Stan’s bequest.

“What happened to you?” he’d said as the twins limped into the Shack. It was quick becoming his usual refrain. But this time they had a good, simple answer.

“Delilah,” they both said.

“Oh,” said Stan, “Yeah, the little mutant was by here just now. She said she’d sworn vengeance on our family. I’ve been _rebuked_. Who goes around _rebuking_ people?”

Now, as Lyra blew out the lamp, Max turned to her in the dark and said, “Are you worried?”

“About Delilah?” she said, “You smashed her magic rock, remember? Even if she is psychic, what’s she going to do now? Guess what number I’m thinking of?”

Max chuckled, “Think of a negative number. You’re invincible! She could never guess it!”

“Yep,” said Lyra, giggling into her pillow, “Invincible. I bet she’s plotting our destruction right now.”

* * *

**XII**

Delilah slammed her front door and let out a wordless shriek of dismay. Damn the Pines! Damn the smelly old fraud, the insufferable dork of a tomboy, and the giggly handsome one. All of them.

Mr. Gleeson came rushing in when he heard his daughter’s cry. “What’s the matter, sunshine? Is everything okay?”

“I’m FINE!” Delilah snapped.

“Do you want to cancel our show tomorrow?”

“Our show? I’m the star, it’s MY show! I could buy and sell you, old man!”

“Fair enough,” Mr. Gleeson muttered as Delilah stormed off to her room.

The amulet had been precious to her. It was so easy to use, and so threatening when used right. Anything else would mean starting fresh.

Oh, well. She had a whole book of fresh starts to pick from. She pulled that book from its hiding place in her bottom drawer and placed in on her desk. Time to start browsing again.

Taking care to treat the binding gently, Delilah flipped open the golden leather cover with its curious plate of the six-fingered hand. On the endpaper was scrawled, _Property of [??]a[???????]i[???] – Volume Two._

_Fk efkapfjeq, sboexmp qeb pzerri moxvdolrka txp klq qeb ybvw mixzb ql kfab pbfobqp ylrka._


	4. Book Four: The Inconvenience Store

**I**

**July 5**

One quiet afternoon as July was getting on, Stan left the Mystery Shack to run some errands. He was planning on throwing a promotional party in a few days, and needed supplies to make the lawn look passingly like a dance hall.

“Wendy, kids, watch the store. I’ll be back in a couple hours,” he said, “You’ll wash the bathrooms, right?”

“Absolutely not,” said Wendy, giving a salute.

Stan laughed this off, “Didn’t think so. Alright, stay out of trouble. Don’t let anyone buy the big sasquatch until I’m back. And remember, we don’t do refunds.”

As soon as he was gone, Max climbed to the top of the shelves and started leaping between them.

Lyra was engrossed in her Journal, trying to decode some of the cryptograms of which the Author, in their inscrutable paranoia, was so fond. There was no key, so she could only go off the one-letter words being either “I” or “a” and run two separate translations working off these two maybe-keys. With great effort, she’d gotten as far as seeing that a sketch of coencentric rings burned on a table was probably labeled “Ghostsign.”

“Max, do you believe in ghosts?” Lyra asked.

“I believe you’re a dork,” said Max, and fell off the shelf.

Wendy closed her till and said to the twins, “You guys want to go hang out on the roof?”

“We can do that?”

“Yeah,” said Wendy, “I do it all the time. Bring that bucket of pinecones .”

To demonstrate, she popped the gift shop skylight, stood on the checkout counter, and hauled herself up out the opening. The twins followed after fetching the pail of pinecones they’d been clearing off the lawn on Stan’s orders.

The roof of the shop was nearly flat, fronting off the Shack’s main two-story gable. Wendy had strapped a flattened lawn chair to the shingles and stashed some cans of pop in the eavestrough. Popping up the chair and passing the twins two cans, the roof became a sunny patio in a matter of seconds.

“You brought the pinecones?” said Wendy.

“Yeah,” said Max, hoisting the bucket, “Why did you want them?”

Wendy picked up a pinecone and tossed it in hand. “Totem pole for five points. Sign for ten. Anywhere that would make Stan yell at you if he was here, twenty.”

Wendy chucked her projectile and bounced it off the back of the thunderbird topping the totem pole. Max aimed for the same spot and missed. After a few throws, Lyra tried for the front lawn sign, aimed too high, and sent her cone right into the open window of an SUV that was pulling up to the parking lot. The car turned right back to the highway. The three guffawed.

“Woah. Now that’s the jackpot!” said Wendy, “High five, dude!” She held out a hand for Lyra, cracking a lopsided grin that twisted her freckles. Her eyes, the colour of woodland moss, flashed behind her glasses. Her auburn hair drifted in the breeze like the tongues of a campfire. She smelled like wood smoke too, like a carefree summer night under the stars.

“Lyra? Don’t leave me hanging!”

Lyra blinked and gave Wendy a weak high-five that nontheless lingered on her hand. She fixed her eyes on the nearby wall of mountains to clear her head of the weird feeling that had come over her so quickly. Wendy didn’t seem to have noticed, but from the bemused glance he gave Lyra, Max had. Of course he had. Lyra had never been able to hide anything from him, even things she didn’t quite get herself.

They played the pinecone game for a few more minutes before a battered blue van pulled into the parking lot. Wendy perked up and skipped to the edge of the roof where a cedar sapling grew just past its level.

“Hey, that’s my friends!” said Wendy, “Cool – you won’t tell Stan about this, right?”

“Scout’s honour,” said Lyra, sticking up three fingers. Max copied the gesture – they’d been in the same troop in Collingwood. Wendy responded with a curt nod and a zip-the-lips gesture. Oh, that was cooler. Lyra decided she should have done that instead.

“Later, dorks,” said Wendy. In one smooth move, she grabbed the top of the tree and jumped from the roof, letting the bend of the trunk land her gently on the lawn.

“Later, Wendy!” Lyra called as Wendy ran to join whoever was in the van. She kept her hand up for just a bit too long, as if she could keep her there a bit longer by hanging on the air.

“Good times,” said Lyra, sitting on the shingles.

Max nudged her in the side. “Someone’s got a crush, eh?”

“What!” said Lyra, “No! I just think Wendy’s cool, you know?”

Max looked at her, inscrutable. “I was kidding,” he said, “But you only get defensive like that when I’m right about something.”

“Okay, but, like… That doesn’t even make sense. She’s a girl.”

“Yeah.” Max reclined on his hands and didn’t speak for a pensive moment. When he did, he said, “Actually, it makes a lot of sense if you think about it.”

“Think about what?”

“Just, like, stuff. Remember in, must have been second grade, when I pretend-married that girl down the street? What was her name?”

“Carly.”

“Right. But then that other kid, Sam? Sam asked you to marry him and you ran to me saying, why do I have to marry a boy? Boys are icky.”

Lyra saw where he was going with this. “That doesn’t mean anything. That’s just kid stuff. Every girl thinks boys are icky when she’s seven.”

“I didn’t think girls were icky, though. All right – Remember that Scout camp when we were eleven? You brought me in the fly of the girls’ tent because you were all talking about crushes and they wanted a boy’s perspective?”

She did. The turn had passed to her and she’d blanked out. One of the other girls had prompted her to say her favourite singer, and she’d trotted out a list of women. Well, they just had nicer voices. More range. More drama.

“Max, you’re not really suggesting…”

“Why not? It’s the twenty-first century, there’s nothing wrong with it.”

“But… That’s not… That’s, like, other people. Not _us_.”

“Not me, I know that, but hey, I’m not you.”

“Max, I’m telling you, I just think Wendy’s cool. It’s not like I lie awake at night thinking about her.”

* * *

**II**

Lyra lay awake that night, thinking. But she wasn’t thinking about Wendy, was she? She was thinking about Max thinking about her thinking about Wendy. There was a difference.

A bird was crooning the last of the evening chorus outside the window. It remined Lyra of Wendy’s laugh. Association! That was all it was! She was thinking about Wendy already, so of course that was what the bird reminded her of. She drew up her sheets around her head. There was enough moonlight to make out the plaid pattern of the quilt, not too different from Wendy’s flannel shirts, always rising to show her midriff as she reached for a shelf, and hanging casually open on the first few buttons to reveal the curve of her collarbone, …

Oh, no.

Lyra fumbled over to look at her brother.

“Max, are you sleeping?”

“Yes,” he grumbled.

“I think I’m in love with Wendy.”

“I’m sleeping.”

“It doesn’t concern you that your sister might be a lesbian?”

“No. I’m sleeping.”

Max turned away from her and shoved his pillow up around his ears. Outside, the bird continued its screeching warble.

* * *

**III**

**July 6**

Lyra stood bleary-eyed over the steaming kettle. She’d gotten precious little sleep last night, and needed a cup of tea if she wanted to look alive by the time Wendy… _By the time work started_. Wendy had nothing to do with anything.

“Morning,” said Max, coming into the kitchen, “You said some crazy stuff in your sleep last night, sis.”

“I wasn’t sleeping,” said Lyra, not looking at him.

“Oh. Was I dreaming?”

“Probably not.”

“Oh.”

In silence, Lyra made her tea as Max cut a bagel. In a moment he appeared by her side, offering it to her. It was her favourite flavour, and already buttered the way she liked it.

Still no words, but Lyra cracked a smile.

When they were both seated for breakfast, Max finally said, “So. Damn. What’s the plan now?”

“What do you mean, plan?”

“I mean, are you going to tell Mom and Dad? What about Gruncle Stan? Wendy?”

Lyra thought about this.

“Not Mom and Dad, yet. I want to keep thinking about it first. Maybe next time we write to them, or the time after that, once I’m, you know, figured out.”

“Okay. Stan?”

“No! No way.”

“Why not?”

“He’s an old man from a small town. That’s, like, the exact demographic that sends people to shock therapy for… for…” in the daylight she couldn’t bring herself to say it aloud. “Questioning things.”

“Come on. Stan loves us. He’s a good guy.”

“Yeah, loves us as cute little cookie-cutter kids. I just don’t want to risk it, okay? I have to spend the rest of the summer with him.”

“Right, exactly. You can’t spend all summer hiding this.”

“Watch me.”

IV

To take her mind off things, Lyra returned to Snake Creek and her Kushtaka hunt. The tracks had been washed away, but she knew from before that they led to a storm drain that must have cleared water from the ski hill’s base area. She hadn’t had a headlight or a screwdriver then, so that had been the end. She did now, so she unfastened the rusty grating and crept inside. It was slow going, bracing against the top of the corrugated steel tunnel. The bottom was slick undefoot from the recent rain, forcing her to brace against the sides.

Up and up into the dark beyond the grafiti-scrawled shallows, and there they were. There was a whole troop of nesting Kushtaka at a junction in the tubes. Lyra stood a safe distance away, shining a red light, and watched through her binoculars. Just like the sketches in the Journal, the creatures were somewhere between monkeys and otters, with beady eyes, oily fur, and sharp claws. Something in their poise told Lyra that they knew she was there. She retreated to the creek once she had a few good pictures, not relishing the thought of those claws in that enclosed space.

The deep green of the trees made her think of Wendy’s eyes, which hadn’t at all been the plan.

* * *

**V**

Back at the Shack that afternoon, Wendy had arrived for her shift. Lyra did her best to ignore the lurching in her stomach. Max and Wendy were getting into a dance-off to one of Wendy’s indie records. It was high summer, 2012, the high age of the big-band acoustic jam; the tastemakers hadn’t yet soured on pounding, danceable folk rock. In fact, the aesthetic of that very place, the misty Northwest of cedarwood and leather and mountain trails, was being exported across the continent. Its ports of trade were Portland, Vancouver, Seattle, but they imported from here in the sleepy-no-more mountains. The energy of youth here at the fount of all vibes was yet infused with hope for a still-dawning decade full of promise, not needing to drown out, but for once both joyful and aware. So they danced, while Lyra hung out across the room, tapped her foot, and pretended to write something down.

“Lyra!”

Lyra dropped her notebook and scrambled to pick it up. “Uh, what?”

“Are you gonna get in on this?” said Wendy.

“I don’t really dance.”

“Yeah, you do,” said Max, fist-pumping his way over to her and turning to Wendy, “Mom used to put her in this little sheep costume and she’d do the Lamby Lamby Dance!”

“This is not a good time to talk about the Lamby Lamby Dance! There is no good time to talk about the Lamby Lamby Dance!” Lyra shrieked.

“Sheep costume?” said Wendy, “Nice. Was there a little tail, and ears, and everything?”

“And everything!” said Max, “She’d skip around and sing about grazing on the daisies. Hey Lyra, why don’t you ever skip anymore?”

Lyra retreated behind a shelf and buried herself in a randomly plucked book for the next hour.

Wendy’s quitting time announced itself with a honk of a van horn outside.

“There’s the gang,” Wendy grinned, “We’re heading out for the night. Should be pretty deck.”

“Sounds fun!” said Lyra, “Hey, why don’t I- we come with you?”

“I dunno, guys. My friends are pretty intense. How old are you again?”

“Fifteen. We’ve been in high school, y’know. Seen it all.”

Wendy shrugged. “Alright. I like your moxie. The more the merrier. Lemme get my stuff.”

As Wendy packed up in the back room, Max took Lyra aside and said to her, “Since when are we fifteen?”

“We’re _almost_ fifteen. Come on, this is our chance to hang out with some cool kids! And Wendy. I guess.”

Max cracked a smile. “Wendy! Obviously.”

“Obviously what?”

“You know exactly what’s obvious, fresh li’l rainbow face.”

“Please don’t call me that.”

“Okay, Little Miss Pride Parade.”

Lyra gathered a souvenir fleece blanket from the shelf and pointed at the other side of the room. “What’s that?”

“Where?” said Max, turning. Lyra threw the blanket over his head and ran outside.

In the parking lot, Wendy was hanging out with a gang of other teenagers. Lyra took in the bunch. There was a skinny guy with long blonde hair, and a black guy with a thin beard, who were teamed up hoisting a chubby guy by his ankles. A skinny guy who had previously been plucking at a guitar stood a ways away and tossed jelly beans into the upside-down one’s mouth. A filipina girl with dyed hair looked on with half-rolled eyes. Perfect. Just too many for Lyra to keep straight. Of course, _keeping straight_ had suddenly become a particular issue for her.

Wendy’s friends stopped tormenting each other when they saw her, and welcomed her into the circle.

“Hey guys,” she said, gesturing the twins over. Max’s hair was on end with static from the blanket. “These are my buddies from work – Max and Lyra.”

Max gave an elaborate salute. Lyra just nodded.

The guy who’d been throwing the jellybeans said, “So, are you, like, babysitting?”

“Come on, Robbie, they’re in high school. They’re cool. Guys? This is Nate, and Lee…” the two who’d been holding the bean target up. Which was which? Wendy didn’t clarify. “…Thompson, who once ate a run-over waffle for a loonie…”

Thompson, the bean target himself, said, “Hey, don’t tell them that!”

Wendy carried on unimpeded. “…Tambry… and Robbie, who you can probably figure out.”

Robbie flipped a head of stringy dark hair and strummed a chord. “Yeah, I’m the one who spray-painted the water tower.”

“Oh, you made the muffin!” said Lyra.

Robbie shot her an offhand glance. “It’s a nuclear explosion. It’s a commentary on society."

“It kinda does look like a muffin,” said Lee, or maybe Nate, and the other (Nate, or maybe Lee) giggled.

Robbie’s glare turned poisonous for a moment for just a moment before Wendy broke the tension by hauling open the van door.

“Alright, guys, let’s head out. I’ve got big plans for tonight!”

Thompson was driving. Robbie called shotgun. Wendy, Max, and Lyra shoved into the tight back bench seat, then clicked up the middle seats to let Lee, Nate, and (Tammy? No, Tambry) fill them. 

The van was filled with empty junk food bags and misscelania. Pencil grafiti covered half the hard surfaces. There were random scribbles, exchanges of insults between the different members of the gang, and a couple of the inexplicably edgy anarchy signs and triangular eyes found on bathrooom stalls the world over. Silently, Max plucked a pencil out of the permanent supply in Lyra’s vest and set to work erasing the latter part of a “you suck” in front of him. The girls looked on as he modified it to “you look nice today.”

“This is gonna blow someone’s mind,” he whispered, and stowed the pencil away.

In the middle seat, Nate/Lee cracked a joke, causing Lee/Nate to punch the ceiling in a fit of laughter.

“Hey!” Thompson protested, “My mom said you guys can’t hit the roof anymore!”

Predictably, this set of a chorus of ceiling-punching and chanting, “Thompson’s Mom! Thompson’s Mom!” Even Max got in on it. Lyra tried to grab at his arm to stop him. He leaned over to her and said, loudly, “What’s up, Lizzie? Am I embarassing you in front of YOUR GIRLF…”

Lyra clapped a hand over Max’s mouth and pulled him into a headlock. Max licked her palm to make her withdraw it and wipe it on her shorts

Lee (or Nate) turned around and said, “Hey, Wendy. Haven’t seen you around much. Wahtchya been up to?”

“Working,” said Wendy, “Making the big bucks! No, that’s a lie. My boss at the creepy cabin is a cheapskate. But hey, it’s chill. Better than the logging camp.”

“And you guys?” he nodded to Max and Lyra.

“Just out for the summer,” said Lyra, “Stan, I mean, Mister Mystery, is our gruncle, I mean, great uncle. So we sleep in the creepy cabin.”

“That’s gotta be a cool experience, eh?” said Wendy.

“Yeah!” said Max, “I think Lyra’s learned a lot about herself in the last couple of days.” He responded to Lyra’s glare with an innocent smile.

The sun was skirting the valley headwall as they crossed the river into town and drove south into a residential suburb. Down at the end of the furthest bungalow-lined street, past a high school field, a squat building stood behind a chain-link construction fence. Beyond was the edge of Gravity Falls and the beginning of the twilit forest. Thompson pulled the van to a stop.

Wendy craned her neck over the seat and said to the twins, “There it is. The condemned 7-11. This is our stop.”

The gang began crawling out of the car. Wendy went first and offered Lyra a hand. A lump formed in her throat. She took Wendy’s hand just as she caught of whiff of her woodsmoke scent. In an instant, the car and the rest of the teenagers were gone. Wendy’s hand was on hers as they danced about a cracking fire, spinning in bare feet and billowing skirts across soft earth, under the stars, to crickets’ nightsong. Wendy would spin Lyra in front of the fire and let her fall back on her resting arm, then lean over her and kiss her deep, letting her taste that smoke that was so tantalizing…

“Ow,” said Lyra. She’d hit her head on the car door. Hopping to the ground, she let go of Wendy’s hand. That night could come later. Tonight was about the abandoned store.

“My mom says she used to hang out on the roof here back when the store was open,” said Tambry, “Every time school got out for the summer they’d burn their notes up there and drink all night. Drove the old folks downstairs nuts, apparently. I always thought it sounded like a good time.”

“Why was it closed?” Lyra asked, “Some kind of health code violation?”

“Health code? Try murder,” said Robbie, “The old coots who owned the place were stabbed to death in a robbery. Blood everywhere, I bet.”

“And it’s been haunted ever since!” said Lee/Nate. 

Robbie scowled at him. “You believe that? Need a safety blanket?”

“Chill, dude. I’m just kidding. They cut the power from the place after that, hey?”

“This town has such a colourful history!” said Max. Lyra eyed the darkened, signless shop. She remembered the fairies, Delilah’s magic stone, the Kushtaka – and then, the Gobblewonker. Real supernatural entities edged out hoaxes 3-1 in Gravity Falls by that sample. She didn’t like those odds. At the same time, the shop drew her in. Seeing a real ghost would be a huge step in her investigations. Plus, if she left now, what would Wendy think?

“We’re all gonna die!” Wendy shrieked in a hammy horror-movie way, then punched Lyra in the shoulder. “Chill out, dude. It’s fine. By the way, want a beer?” The older teens were passing around cans from a cooler in the van’s back hatch.

“Don’t give the kids booze, Wendy,” said Tambry, “You think twelve-year-olds like your craft shit?”

“Chill, Tambry. I’ll give them something sweet. Wine coolers or something.”

“There’s a bottle of cider in there,” said Thompson, nodding at the cooler. Wendy fetched it.

“Anyone got a bottle opener?” she said. Lyra took her Scouts pocketknife from its handy sheath in her vest and snapped open the last attachment she’d expected to have needed. She had a few sporting sips of the cider before passing it off to Max.

Robbie had already taken the lead and scrambled over the fence. Wendy, Tambry, Thompson, and Max followed, Max holding his cider in one hand. Lyra climbed easily enough, but hesitated at the top. While there wasn’t barbed wire on the top of the fence, the tops of the fence wires themselves were unblunted and made a wall of spines three inches above the bar on the other side. Lyra was in shorts. As she pondered how to keep her legs from being torn to shreds as she made the switch to the other side, the shift in her weight sent the wire swinging wildly off the bar. No way this thing was built to hold her weight.

One step higher, and she swung one foot over the top, trying not to think about what would happen if she lost her balance and fell while straddling the spikes.

“Come on, Lyra!” That was Wendy, calling from the other side.

“Kid, your brother did it!” And _that_ was Robbie.

“You know what?” said Lee/Nate, climbing up the fence, “I’m just gonna boost her over. Cool?” He didn’t wait for Lyra to confirm that it was cool before grabbing her leg and tossing her over the fence. She scrambled to find a foothold, caught a toe in a fence hole, and twisted around to land hard on her back in a patch of juniper.

“Nice job throwing a little girl in a bush, genius.”

“Yeah, your mom’s a genius.”

Wendy offered a hand to help Lyra to her feet. She took it and flushed, adding a fifth shade of red to her body’s patchwork of sunburn, scratches, acne, and mosquito bites.

The eight took stock as Lee and Nate hopped down from the fence, and Wendy led them across the cracked parking lot to the front doors of the store. Posters for sales ten years past wrinkled yellow against the dirty glass.

Wendy surveyed the doors for a moment and said, “All right, Robbie. This was your idea. How were you planning to get in?”

“Bust it down with the car,” said Robbie, “I forgot about the fence.” He threw a shoulder against the lock as if he could snap it with brute force.

“Can I take a crack at it?” Lyra piped up.

“Sure,” said Robbie, yanking on the handle, “Strongest guy here can’t do it but I’m sure a skinny little girl can Hercules right through.”

Lyra burned. She pulled the cider from Max, took a throat-burning draft, passed it back to him, and set to work.

There was no way into the store through the front door, obviously. The back doors were probably just as tight. That left the holes in the building envelope not meant for humans.

She cut around back and climbed on top of a dumpster. From there it was a jump to grab the eavestrough and haul herself onto the sloped outer roof. She scrambled up the shingles and dropped behind the parapet to the tar-and-gravel inside. The gang stared up agog. 

“Kid, what are you doing?”

The big metal HVAC unit rusted away in the middle of the roof. Lyra set at the screws of biggest vent grille with the tip of her knife.

“Go, Lyra! Teach that metal thing a lesson!”

It took a stressful few minutes of focused screwing to free the grille. Lyra went in feet-first, praying she wouldn’t land on a running fan or a furnace. Lowering herself into the claustrophobic vent, the sounds of shouting were muffled

“Hey! Lyra! Take it easy, eh?”

“Who wants to bet she doesn’t make it?”

Feeling the bottom of the shaft with a foot, Lyra dropped onto sheet metal that buckled beneath her, but didn’t break. God, she hoped no one had redone the vents in the last ten years. She jumped. The sheet bent deeper. Screws strained. She braced her arms against the tight sides of the duct – no one bigger could have fit – and jumped, again and again, pushing away at the panels.

The joint came apart all of a sudden, and Lyra came crashing into darkness. There was a smell of plaster in the musky air. She drew out a flashlight and flicked it on, lying dazed. The beam illuminated a snowstorm of dust from where she’d crashed through the duct and the fibrous ceiling panels beneath it. She’d landed in a thick painting of dust on linoleum.

From the inside, the doors were locked with a simple latch. Lyra clicked this open before knocking on the glass and waving through the grime. She opened the doors with a flourish, letting in a welcome stream of fresh mountain air.

“Holy shit,” said Wendy.

Lyra would have crashed through a hundred roofs for the look Wendy gave her then.

Lyra held the door open for the rest of them, trading high-fives with the line, even Robbie.

“Good call inviting this maniac,” said Thompson, beaming.

Lyra skipped inside behind them, and Max passed her the cider for a victory swig. Even though she’d only had a bit of it, the booze was already pairing with the thrill of entry to set her head buzzing. The doors swung shut, and turned the evening night murky. Away from the entrance, that murkiness faded into black gloom. Someone tried the light switches, to no avail. A quick stock-taking showed they had three lights among them: Lyra’s, Wendy’s, and Thompson’s. Everyone clustered around a torchbearer: Max to Lyra, Robbie and Tambry to Wendy, Nate and Lee to Thompson. These three gangs assembled, they set out deeper into store, always within easy earshot of each other. Voices were muffled by the dust and the dark, making the store seem vast.

“Think it’s really haunted?”

“Seriously, dude?”

“Yeah. It’s seriously creepy.”

“Ooh! Where do you think they keep the bodies?”

“Shut up, man!”

Slowly, Lyra’s eyes adjusted to the dark. Someone found a small section of camping gear, with a shelf of old battery lanterns. Most were long broken. The few that flickered weakly to life were placed around the shop. Now at least there were beacons showing the general layout of the place, though in the waver of near-dead batteries, shadows still outspaced the light.

Lights taken care of, if only passably, everyone regrouped.

“So what do we do now?”

Wendy grinned and said, “Whatever we want.”

So they climbed over rows of shelves and chucked ten-year-old bags of chips in a food fight that was more like trench warfare. They tried the old coke-and-mentoes experiment to spectacular effect. They drank beer and melted freezie pops. Robbie smoked in one of the many shadowy corners, visible only as a floating ember.

Max was particularly excited to find a shelf stocked with some sort of powdered candy he claimed had banned in both Canada and the States for the last decade.

“Maybe they had a good reason,” Lyra tried to point out, but he’d already ripped open a package to pour in his mouth.

Lyra left him to his toxic candy and joined Wendy, who was into an old box of Twinkies. Maybe it was the hard cider, but it was suddenly easy to be with her again – notwithstanding Lyra’s sudden awareness of how Wendy’s jeans hugged her hips. She ran her foot across a spot on the floor that had been lightly burned in a set of coincentric circles. Through the fog of tipsiness, she recalled that that was important somehow, though she couldn’t think why.

“Lyra, my dude,” said Wendy, “This night is, like, legendary.”

“What d’you mean?”

Wendy gestured in a vague circle. “Look around. The guys are bonding, I’ve never seen Tambry this emotive before, and your brother’s going nuts with that knockoff Fun Dip.”

Max stumbled over to them and collapsed against the wall. “Maybeeee I’ve had too much,” he said, than turned to address the empty air, “What do you think, big boy? Oh, you’re a good dog!”

Wendy patted Max on the shoulder, pulled his candy pack away, and threw it across the room. He slumped to the floor, eyes glazing over.

“Y’know Lyra, I really wasn’t sure you could hang with this crew, but you’re suprisingly mature for your age,” said Wendy.

“Yes I am,” said Lyra. She tried to take a confident swig of cider, missed her mouth, and splashed herself in the face with the last third of the bottle.

Wendy smirked. “Want me to get you another of those from the fridges back there?”

“I’m good. You want something, though?”

“Sure. Grab me whatever’s not expired.”

Lyra went to the fridges and pulled open a heavy door. A cold blast of mildew met her. Shining her flashlight, she scanned the rows of pop. Cans had popped from age and winter freezing. Moldy foam graced their rims. Then she swept her light upwards.

Dark metallic eyes rimmed in blood met her own, trailing sinew and nerves in a sickening fascimile of a human nervous system. A twisted cord of flesh unfurled itself from a broken bottle and waved its way through the clouds of freezer dust, drifting toward’s Lyra’s face.

She screamed and slammed the door shut. Rushing footsteps sounded, then Lee and Nate were standing by.

“Yo, what’s up? You freaking out, kid? Need to go outside for a bit?”

“No, I’m fine,” said Lyra, “I mean, it’s cool. Everything’s cool.”

Robbie strode in with his usual above-it-all expression. Before he could comment, Lyra plucked a footbag from a nearby display case and said, “Anyone up for hacky sack?”

She’d never played hacky sack before, and knew she’d be no good at it, but needed a distraction. It’d been a good choice. The three of them made a circle and starting playing – they were all pretty good – as Lyra crept away. Bracing herself, she edged open the fridge door again. Nothing. Just a lot of old drinks. She decided she’d had enough of her cider, and left it pointedly unfinished on a table.

Lyra went over to Max. He was still slumped on the floor where she’d last seen him.

“Max! I need your help. I think the store’s haunted for real. There’s no way we can get ahold of Gruncle Stan from in here, and I don’t want the gang to think I’m being a scared little kid.”

Max said nothing, but licked at a bit of powder on the corner of his mouth.

“How many of those powder things did you have!”

“Bleven,” said Max, his eyes thoroughly glazed over. Clearly he was out for the count.

Lyra went to the centre of the store, and just watched. The sun had set outside, and the darkness beyond the dim reach of the lanterns was absolute, pressing in. How could a little shop, exactly like so many others, feel so enormous? With the walls hidden in shadow, the shelves might have just marched on forever.

A while later, as Lyra was still frozen in the safety of lamplight, Robbie called out “Guys – come look at this!”

Everyone (except Max, who was still tripping out by the slurpee machines, and Thompson) gathered around. He was standing behind the checkout counter, staring into the floor. Drawn there in outlines of faded chalk were the shapes of two portly bodies in side-by-side sprawling positions. Lyra’s mouth dried up. Robbie cautiously tapped one outline with his foot.

“I thought there’d be blood,” he said, sounding dissapointed. The lanterns flickered, threatening to plunge the scene into darkness. No one spoke until Robbie nudged Lee (or Nate) in the side and said, “Hey, dare you to lie down in it.”

“Good idea,” said Lee (or Nate) and nudged Nate (or Lee). “Go lie down in it.”

The mood lightened, if by force, he obediently cracked a smile and positioned his feet beneath one of the figures. “Look! I’m a dead body!”

“No!”

Everyone stopped and looked at Lyra, who’d shouted louder than she’d intended. “Oh! The kid’s scared?” said Robbie.

Lyra cleared her throat. “Look, shouldn’t we just be careful? Seems like tempting fate. Especially if it really is, um, haunted.”

“Oh, boo! Take it down a notch, kay? You’re killing the vibe hardcore.”

“But I got you guys in here!”

“Yeah? That was kind of cool, I guess. And now that we’re in, you’re killing the vibe.”

Lyra glanced at Wendy for help. She ran a hand up her face, tilting her glasses, and said, “Yeah, a little bit.”

Tambry folded her arms and spun around. “Ugh. I was hoping to write something about this for my blog. _Trapped in store with insane twelve-year-old_ isn’t a draw.”

“I’m not twelve!” Lyra snapped, and she leapt forwards to lie down in the chalk outlines. “I’m fifteen! Technically a high schooler!”

And the lanterns went dark.

For a moment, nothing. Ink. Then a piercing feminine shriek cut through the black. Not Lyra. Not Wendy.

“Tambry!” one of the guys shouted.

Half the lanterns flickered back to life, casting a pallid almost-light on the five terrified faces that remained.

“Tambry… Tambry, where… Where did she go!”

“Tambry! Can you hear us!”

The girl was gone, vanished in the blink of the lanterns. Then something knocked on the ceiling, and they all looked up.

Tambry hung upside down with her lower body shoved inside the ceiling panels. Her head and arms hung down from the shattered panel Lyra had crashed through to enter. Even from that distance in the dim light, they could tell that her eyes were empty. Her jaw hung slack. She was breathing rapidly, alive, but otherwise unmoving.

Wendy leapt up onto the counter and hauled Tambry down, coating her in asbestos dust. She was still comatose, and just lay twitching in Wendy’s arms.

“Guys!” Wendy cried, “What do we do?”

“We LEAVE,” Robbie declared, “Take her and get to the door!”

Wendy nodded. “Someone go get Max and meet us outside.”

Thompson was somehow still playing hacky sack. He’d been on such a roll of kicks, he’d barely noticed the lights going out. Nate and Lee split up to drag him and Max towards the door.

And then, another flash of blackness, and Thompson was on the floor. The heavy steel shelves had fallen atop each other and him, and their boxes of hacky-sacks and drinks were pinning him down, pressing into the floor with more force than their weight.

Ghosts. No question.

As she joined Nate and Lee in trying to haul Thompson out of his prison, Lyra racked her brain to remember _Why Death Doesn’t Work Here_ , from the Journal.

_Human souls, departing upon death, bound for quite literally God-knows-where (maybe nowhere), are sometimes trapped in what I’ve conceptually called the Ghost Field. This must exist because through it the unquiet dead wreak havoc – though only within GF._

_What is field made of? Unknown_

_Why do some souls get stuck? Unfinished business on Earth? Cancels out “soul inertia” that would otherwise push them through?_

_What powers act thru field? Levitation, electromancy, illusions, posession, pyromancy, petrifrication_

On another page, the Author had made a ten-category scale for sorting these souls that were apparently caught in the town’s weird field like flies in a glue trap.

_Category 1: Tricksters_

_Pose no threat to humans. Seem motivated by a tragic, impossible desire to rejoin the living. Cat. 1 I encountered at the old cabin wanted me to join it in G-rated adventures, oblivious to the fact that I am a scientist and not a 9-year-old girl at a slumber party. Kind of cute. Small-object levitation._

_Catgeory 2: Haunters_

_Threatening but not life-threatening. Malicious, but not murderous. Defenders of territory, often death territory. Larger levitation, temporary mind-numbing, illusionism, elctromancy up to 2 KW,_

She couldn’t remember the rest.

The harder they pulled, the harder the ghosts pressed the shelves down on Thompson, winding him. _Larger levitation_. How much power did the lanterns use? No more than two kilowatts, probably. So the spectres of the shop owners – it had to be them – were a Category Two, maybe Three. Lyra shuddered. If they could do this, what would a Category Nine or Ten be like?

As Robbie dragged Max by one arm towards the doors, they swung shut. The lock clicked. Robbie went to the latch, but his fingers slipped off as if it were oiled.

“Everyone, stop!” Lyra shouted.

They did, stunned by the authority in her voice.

“Whatever’s doing this has to have a reason. We need to figure out what they want!”

“Yeah, I’m sure the ghosts just want to talk about their feelings!” Robbie shouted back.

And then he slumped to the linoleum, eyes as dead as Tambry’s. Max began to shudder on the floor and then rose up on invisible puppets strings, toes scraping the floor in an impossible stance. Something spoke slurringly through his slack mouth.

“WELCOME TO YOUR GRAVES, YOUNG TRESPASSERS!”

Wendy fell to her knees before Max’s suspended figure. “Please! We’re sorry for hanging out in your store! Let us leave and we won’t come back.”

Nate and Lee split up, rushed around Max, and began to take turns shoulder-checking the doors.

“Just… Let… Us… Go!”

Max’s head twisted around, dragging his hanging body with it. “I don’t like your tone!” the ghost croaked. Flicker again, and now Nate and Lee were crumpled right along with the rest.

Max’s legs knocked against the shelves, toppling them one into the next as he drifted towards Wendy and Lyra. Sale items lifted off the racks as they fell, rising into a cyclone of expired snacks with the two girls at the centre. As if Lyra’s heart wasn’t hammering enough already, Wendy grabbed her around the waist and pulled her into herself.

“Counter!” said Wendy. Lyra nodded. Behind the checkout counter, there was less stuff to fly around. They broke apart and crawled to safety. As debris flew overhead, they pushed into the underhang of an empty cabinet.

“What do they want from us?” said Wendy.

“Revenge, I guess?”

“But what did we do to them?”

Lyra massaged her temples, feeling the grooves of the birth scars over her right eye. “Pattern. We need a pattern. What was everyone doing when they were taken?”

“Tambry was talking about writing her blog. Thompson was playing hacky-sack. Robbie was just kind of being sarcastic. Nate and Lee were trying to talk them down…” As she spoke, Wendy squeezed Lyra’s hand to concentrate, which of course completely shattered Lyra’s own concentration. “I don’t get it. Those are just normal teenager things to do, aren’t they?”

_Normal teenager things…_ _Drove the old folks downstairs nuts…_

That was it. That had to be it. Lyra gave a squeeze on Wendy’s hand and said, “Wait here. Stay safe.” Then she crawled out from the counter and stood up.

“Hey, Ghost!”

Max roared. A bag of chips struck Lyra across the face. She stood her ground and shouted into the wind, “I’M NOT A HIGH SCHOOLER!”

The ghost cocked Max’s head. “Oh?”

“Yes! I’m fourteen! I won’t be in tenth grade until next year. I’m practically a little girl.”

Max fell to the floor and moaned in his own voice. The spiralling products stopped. A cold wind blew, though no door had been open, and Lyra felt a weird presence pushing in on her.

A voice inside her head – the voice of a kindly-sounding old lady – said, _Well, why didn’t you just say so?_

Lyra felt goosebumps along her legs. She dared to glance back and saw Wendy peeking over the counter. Could she hear the voice too? Or was this a direct line to the Ghost Field?

_When we were alive, the kids from the high school were a scourge on our store_. That was another voice, a gruff man. _Always sassafrassing customers, disturbing the peace with their boom boxes and baggy pants. We banned them, but they retaliated, climbing onto the roof and playing this newfangled music through the vents. We heard someone shouting in the vents earlier tonight!_

“I can’t imagine!” said Lyra aloud, “Messing about in the ducts? Disrespectful!”

_What terrible memories it brought back! The lyrics were so hateful, so vulgar. In climbing up to clear them, we were both struck down with heart attacks. All those teenagers’ faults!_

“Of course it was.” Lyra tried her best to look young and innocent – widening her eyes, messing up her hair, slouching forwards to cover her breasts. “But these teenagers are my friends! Isn’t there anything I can do?”

A cluck of a tongue sounded out of the air. _Well, I can’t say no to a cute little girl like yourself! They were always our favourite customers. There was a young’un who would do the cutest little dances while her parents shopped, remember that, honey?_

_Oh, yes! Adorable! Just adorable! Do you know any funny little dances, sweetheart? That would be so worth all the trouble!_

“Would you let my friends go?”

_Oh, if it’s a good dance._

The dread that filled Lyra then was far more consuming than the terrors of the haunting.

“Well… I do know… the Lamby Lamby Dance. But I can’t do it without a lamb costume! So we’ll have to find another way, I suppose.”

_Wool blankets, aisle ten!_

A lambswool blanket came fluteering over and wrapped itself inside-out around Lyra, covering her in puffy fur.

Well, there it was.

When she was finished, burning as hot as her namesake stars, Lyra let the blanket fall to the floor. She didn’t dare to turn and look at Wendy.

_That was some fine girly dancing, young lady. Your friends are free to go._

“Good,” Lyra wheezed, “Don’t worry about us ever coming back.”

There was a commotion around the store as everyone jolted awake. Thompson pulled himself out from under the shelves. Max pulled himself up onto the floor, taking note of the blanket at Lyra’s feet.

“I’m never eating or doing anything ever again,” he moaned. Lyra gave him a supportive side-hug.

Robbie limped over. “What happened?”

Wendy chuckled. “You wouldn’t believe it. The ghosts started speaking through Max, and Lyra had to…” She caught Lyra’s eye and paused. “She went right at him and held him down. The ghosts started punching at her with his fists, but she blocked them all and did this crazy exorcism ritual on him that cleared up everything. It was insane! Coolest thing I’ve ever seen!”

The gang exchanged impressed glances. Lyra got a series of hearty claps on the back. Wendy looked to her and zipped her lips.

* * *

**VI**

The brighter constellations were beginning to shine through the velvety blue of late twilight. The two Dippers, Cassiopeia, all the other ones no one knew. Lyra looked for Vega, heart of her namesake. It was there, shining bright, but the rest of Lyra (the constellation) was still too dim for Lyra (the girl) to make out. There was something about the night sky, Lyra had always found, that made one feel watched over, not in a frightening way, but comfortingly, as if all starlight sparked from a gentle cosmic mother’s eyes.

It wasn’t yet midnight, but most of the gang were piled atop each other, passed out in the van’s bench seats. After drinking, running around, having their minds fuzzed over with interference from the Ghost Field, getting spin-cycled in a levitation vortex, and even then having to climb back over the spiny fence, they were understandably all out of energy.

Wendy gazed at the sliver of the near-new moon over the sprucetops. “I think I’m scarred for life,” she said, perfectly candid, “When I get home I’m going to have to stare at a wall for a while and rethink absolutely everything.”

“Yep,” said Lyra. There was nothing else to be said.

“Next time we hang out, let’s just stick around the Mystery Shack, okay? Keep it low-key.”

“Next time? Oh, yeah.” _Next time_. There’d be a next time. If that could be said, then the night was a victory. That fireside dance still hung in the ungraspable future.

Wendy drove everyone home along the quiet streets. There was no one out in the cool night, save a couple of wandering deer. The twins sat in the back seat, half-consious, with Thompson. Max stared blankly at the seat in front of him, where _you look nice today_ had been freshly penciled.

“What kind of sick joke is that?” he said.

* * *

**VII**

That night in the attic:

A bat bounced against the roof above. Max cringed and rubbed his shins where the ghosts had dragged him over the shelves.

“Hey, sis?”

“Yeah?”

“No monster hunts tomorrow, okay? My legs won’t work.”

“Fine. Stan’s going to have us set up for that party anyways. But just tomorrow. I still need data.”

Max scoffed. “Data? Tonight wasn’t enough data on spooks for you?”

“It was a start,” Lyra admitted, “But if the mysteries of this town are going to keep driving our summer, we need more nights like that. More data means connections. Connections means answers.”

Neither spoke for a while. Lyra stared up at the slope of the ceiling and imagined a pinned-up net of strings and documents, organizing everything she’d learned. She ought to do that.

“It’s turning into a pretty complicated summer, then,” said Max eventually.

“What d’you mean?”

“I mean, I wanted to just hang out, get some romance…”

“You’re over that, right? After Delilah and the Fairies? You’ve got to be?”

“Eh. Maybe for a bit, yeah. I guess I care less. But that’s still there, plus your monster book, and now you’re into the romance side too… Not how I would have expected, but still. And speaking of Delilah, we’ve got her to worry about too, since she hates us now. Though you know, your whole thing might actually make the romance side easier, since now we can share cute girls between us. You can have the gay ones, I’ll take the straights.”

“Deal. What if they’re bisexual?”

“Rock-paper-scissors.”

“Sounds good to me.” She yawned. “Night, Max.”

“Night, Lyra. Sleep tight. Don’t let the monsters bite.”

But letting them bite was exactly her plan.

_20-8-5 6-9-5-12-4 15-21-20 20-8-5-18-5 23-1-19 13-1-4-5 6-15-18_

_23-1-18-18-9-15-18-19_

_2-21-20 5-14-4-5-4 21-16 10-21-19-20 3-1-20-3-8-9-14-7_

_23-15-18-18-9-15-18-19_


	5. Book Five: Lyre, Lyre

**I**

**July 7**

It was what Stan called a ten-foot day, not in reference to any length, but because all five pairs of Mystery Shacker feet (his, Soos’s, Wendy’s, Max’s, and Lyra’s) were to be on deck and moving all day. The aim was to throw a party, for no reason beyond that of profit. By first twilight, the front lawn was to be an outdoor dance hall, complete with lights and a karaoke stage (Max’s idea.) Everyone would be hard at work setting this up to draw in dancers and channel the resting crowd into the Shack itself to spend on merchandise.

Or rather, that was the idea. Instead Max lay on the couch on the porch and groaned for his sister.

“Lyra. Lyra! I don’t feel so good. Will you come here?”

“Oh, no! Why don’t you call me over with both hands, you poor thing?” Max had one hand shoved into the couch behind him. Lyra knew what he was planning, and had a counterattack ready, so neither of them had two free hands.

“Just come here, Lyra… Close, so I can whisper, for how my throat hurts… I might just… _Blaaargh!”_

He whipped a can of silly string out from behind him and sprayed Lyra in the face.

“Disgusting!” she cried, “Gruncle Stan, what did you feed us? Why, I might just… _Blegh!”_ Max took a stream of string in his face and across the front of his shirt. Leaping from the couch, he dove off the porch and peeked up over the board, can held ready. Lyra took up a similar position behind the couch. They stared, eyes and aerosol tips the only bits visible, and waited for the other to make a move.

They never got the chance. Wendy came bounding out the door in a panic and looked from each of them to the other. Her eyes were wild, though maybe that was just sleeplessness after the previous night’s ghostly debacle.

“Guys!” she said “You have to listen! Something terrible has happened!”

Lyra dropped her guard and stood up. Across the porch, Max did the same.

“What is it, Wendy?” he said.

Wendy hung her head and reached for something in her back pocket. “Well you see, I just found out that… _BLAARGHHH!”_

Wendy’s attack was perfectly timed and brilliantly calculated. She pulled out her own can and whipped it between Lyra and Max, getting them both in concentrated sprays and splattering a wide arc of string across the deck of the porch.

The twins bunched together, joining their forces against the new threat. The battle was nearing a climax when Stan came forth to end it. He marched through a barrage of silly string to seize the cans from their hands and declare party supplies off-limits until the actual event opened at 8:00 that night. He assembled the rest of the staff, at which point Soos asked, “Mr. Pines, is it some holiday?”

“No,” said Stan, “Just a new tradition. Now that we’ve got the manpower to do it, I was going to have these weekend parties to drum up business. The kids of this town want fun? I’ll smother them with fun!”

“Maybe talking about smothering kids is why families don’t come here,” said Lyra.

“Hey, now, enough of that,” said Stan, “We’ve still got lots to do. If you want to be useful, you can copy these ticket sheets.” He held out a coloured piece of paper printed on one side with “admit one” tickets.

“Oh boy,” said Max, “A trip to the copier store.”

“Posters, calendars, t-shirts, and more! They’ve got it all at the copier store!” sang Soos.

“Is that their slogan?”

“No, but it should be. I have a lot of positive feelings about the copier store, you know?”

“Save the trip and the write-off,” said Stan, “There’s a copier in my office upstairs. Old thing, came with the house, but I think it’s got ink.”

Stan led them up to the second bedroom he used as an office. It was full of filing cabinets, loose stacks of paper, and miscellaneous junk. No wonder the twins slept in the attic. It would have been a year’s task even finding anything in here, let alone organizing and clearing it out. He’d obviously tried, though – weathering on the floorboards showed the furniture had been moved recently. Until probably a few weeks ago, the closet in the back would have been concealed by cabinets. Inside was a dusty machine that only passingly resembled an ancient photocopier. It might have been more easily mistaken for a doorless fridge, some sort of oven, or an elaborate sprinkler.

Stan locked all his filing cabinets and safes before leaving them to it. This struck Lyra as slightly paranoid, since what would they even care to vandalize?

The copier booted up all right, though it took a while to find the power button. Every printer in the world makes a veritable symphony of ambiguous differently pitched whirring noises as it starts up, but that particular machine seemed to drag the process on for an especially long time. 

As it did so, Lyra looked around the office. There were old ads for the Mystery Shack, tax forms with bits whited out, and on the wall, a diploma in a frame. Stan had a P.H.D.? He’d gone to McGill? The most prestigious college in Canada, and he was running a business like this? It didn’t make sense, but there it was, plain as day and never retouched: Stanford Pines, Doctor of Physics. Strange.

When the printer finally fell silent, Lyra inspected. The scanning bed was coated in a thick layer of dust that filled the air when she lifted it. She wiped this off with her sleeve. It was enormous, too, big enough for her to lie down in if she curled up.

Lyra was thinking of how to best lay the flyers on the huge scanner when Max, without warning, hit the most promising button to test the machine. Her arm was still resting on the bed.

The machine began a long series of wracking electronic noises. The oven-like contraption at its far end began to hiss steam and jets of some colourless fluid. Lyra couldn’t even tell where the paper would come out, but there was stuff shooting from every side of the box and coalescing into a long shape at the bottom. 

Pulling her arm off the scanner, Lyra went to examine the mess. The pile of flesh-coloured goop was gathering itself up and solidifying. It became a long ovoid shape, then pushed out fingers. 

Within seconds, a human forearm lay in the bay of the machine. No, not just an arm. The skinny, sunburnt, scabbed-up arm of a fourteen-year-old girl. It was Lyra’s arm, copied down to the mosquito bites.

Catching her awestruck stare, Max came around to look at the bay himself. He jumped when he saw the arm, spilling his glass of water.

Lyra gripped him. “Max,” she said, “This isn’t a copier. It’s a 3-D printer.”

“Apparently,” said Max.

“But… It copied human flesh. That’s impossible, right?”

“Obviously not. Is there anything about this in the Journal?”

“No. This is something different, something new. I wonder how Stan got it?”

“He said it came with the house… Look!”

He was indicating where his glass of water had splashed the arm. The printer goop had soaked in the water and melted. What was rest of the arm was some sort of carbonate lattice structure, forming organs and bones as quickly as it crumbled away at the touch of liquid.

When it was nothing more than dust and slime, Max prodded the arm’s remains with his foot. Nothing happened. He turned to Lyra, but she was beyond words, her mind racing. If it could make an arm, could it make a whole body? A brain? And would that brain be alive? Could it be, if the energy of a ghost was apparently separate from a body?

Body, brain, and a ghost with it. One person could become a thousand.

Now this was data worth gathering!

* * *

**II**

“Okay party people, and Lyra,” said Stan, “Let’s talk business.”

Lyra frowned her displeasure at Stan’s dismissive, if not entirely inaccurate, thoughts on her enthusiasm about the night. He didn’t notice, having already moved on to doling out jobs.

“Soos, you’re DJ, because you begged.” 

He’d also said he would work for free. That was probably the deciding factor.

“You won’t regret this, Mr. Pines,” Soos assured, “I got a library book from 1993 on how to DJ r-r-r-right.”

“That’s highly discouraging. Okay, Max, Wendy, you’ll be on the ticket stand in the parking lot.”

“What!” cried Max, “Gruncle Stan, this is my chance to make friends here! The way things are going, I won’t know anyone in town all summer. I can’t make friends from the parking lot.”

Stan’s eyes did soften with sympathy, but he said, “I need two people working that table, okay?”

Lyra stuck up her hand and haltingly took her chance. “I… I’m a second person. I could work the ticket booth with Wendy. I mean, Max could go to the party, I guess. If I were out in the parking lot, then he’d be free…”

Stan cut her off. “If you do that, you have to stick to it. You have to promise to stay with Wendy all night. No chasing monsters in the woods.”

Lyra sniffed and caught a whiff of the woodsmoke smell that followed Wendy everywhere. Did her house have a wood stove? Or was it some sort of perfume? Whichever, it was the easiest promise Lyra had made in a good while.

“Great. By the way, did you get those sheets copied?” said Stan.

“Printer was busted,” said Lyra.

* * *

**III**

Most of the clothes Lyra had packed for the summer were those ideal for walks in the wood: sweat-wicking t-shirts, warmer flannels, shorts with plenty of pockets for tools and specimens. She only had one nice outfit for an evening party, which consisted of a tartan skirt and sailor blouse. As Lyra dressed she wondered if her usual stuff was a better expression of that rough style lesbians on TV seemed to go for. Should she begin trying for that sort of look? She knew she didn’t want a buzz cut.

When Max saw her dressed to the eights (the nines were thoroughly out of reach) he cracked a smile and raised an eyebrow.

“What?”

“Real subtle down there, weren’t you? _Uh, uh, I can work the ticket stand with you, Wendy! And let’s make out in the parking lot!_ ”

“Laugh all you want,” said Lyra, “You’re right, though. I have a plan to make sure everything goes perfectly. This is the night that _my_ epic summer romance begins!”

“A plan? Oh, you’re not making, like, a checklist, are you?”

“No,” said Lyra, tucking in the corner of the checklist sticking out of her shirt’s breast pocket. Too slow. Max lunged forwards and plucked it out.

“That’s a lot of steps,” he said at a glance.

“They’re not steps,” said Lyra, “It’s just ideas and reminders for playful banter. That’s the first stage in the master plan. Banter is like talking, but smarter.”

“Sounds like a dumb idea for poop-heads.”

“Right, see, that’s not banter.”

“Why can’t you just talk to her like a normal person? She’s already our friend.”

“I am going to talk to her like a normal person! That’s what the list is for. It’s engineered normal.”

“I don’t think that’s a thing. Okay, banter is stage one. What’s stage two?”

“Transitioning the conversation into asking her to dance. That bit’s trickier. But I’ve got a plan, so nothing should get in my way.”

“Lyra, you’re the only one getting in your way.”

Lyra pushed past him to go downstairs. Wendy was setting up a card table for admissions.

People were already waiting around when the girls took their seats at the cash box at eight, the hour Stan had advertised the party starting. Though it was still two hours to true sunset, the evening sun lay golden through the treetops. String lights looped through trees around the lawn were already lit, and danced in the breeze, making weird shadows. It wasn’t at all a bad job, sitting with Wendy in the twilight, taking cash for admission and eating popcorn out of a big shared bowl.

“Good popcorn,” said Lyra.

“I guess it is,” said Wendy, making change for someone.

“I mean, popcorn is popcorn. Not the greatest thing in the world, but it’s good. What’s your favourite snack food?”

That was good. Casual question, no implications, lots of conversational potential.

Wendy pondered. “I can’t pick just one,” she said.

“No way! Me too!”

“What?”

“Uh, I mean—”

Good no longer. Time for a new topic.

* * *

**IV**

Max glanced occasionally to the parking lot to see how Lyra and Wendy were getting on, but mostly he danced. He started on the very first song and changed it up as Soos played through the mix. It was a varied, almost slapdash playlist that the Shackers had spent the last couple days collaborating on. Max had managed to mix in some of his favourite Beatles albums; Stan contributed a mercifully small bit of so-called “classic” disco; Soos threw in some upbeat hip-hop; and there was quite a lot of the drum-and-ukulele indie folk rock to which Lyra and Wendy were both partial. On occasion Soos would call out things like “The energy! It’s electric!” in the instrumentals and run through several dog-related buttons on his sound-effect board before finding the lightning strike he’d been looking for.

The dance party on the lawn was adjoined by the open gift shop, which Stan, himself running Wendy’s till, tempted people into with washrooms and snack tables. Taking a break, Max went in.

“Does your uncle know how to throw a party or what!” Stan said to him. Max gave him a grin and thumbs up and went to pour himself a Pitt. It was gross, but it was pop, sort of. 

Two other kids were poking at the snacks. They were a study in contrasts, respectively the biggest and smallest teenage boys Max had ever seen. The big redheaded one had a lizard draped around his shoulders, to which he was feeding cheese puffs. His t-shirt read COOL in block letters. No touristy or ironic graphics, just COOL.

“Wow! You have an animal on your body!” Max pointed out, “I’m Max, by the way. I live here.”

“I’m George,” said the guy with the lizard, “And this is Harry.” George indicated his tiny, bespectacled, Asian companion. Harry waved. He had compostable plastic forks taped to his fingers.

“Why do you have forks taped to your fingers?” Max asked cheerfully.

“Transhumanism,” said Harry.

“Eh?”

“Next stage in human evolution! Improvement of the human body with technology!”

“Neat! But why do you have forks taped to your fingers?”

To demonstrate, Harry stuck his hand in a bowl of popcorn and withdrew it with six kernels on the forks. He ate these with slow pride. 

Max became convinced of two facts: that Harry was a genius of all too rare stature, and that he finally understood what people meant when they spoke of finding their people.

Max, George, and Harry chatted more about lizards and transhumanism as they wandered out onto the porch to watch the party. A small crowd had gathered around a blonde girl who was dancing with a grace too dignified for the setting. She’d nailed the preppy look that Lyra had been trying for with her plaid skirt, making It look both expensive and effortless. As much as she danced, not a strand of her hair was out of place.

Max tapped his foot to the beat until the song wound down. Soos took the opportunity of the lull to make an announcement, which he read out of his library book. 

“Don’t forget! Whoever, uh, “party hardies” the most wins the Party Crown!”

He held aloft a plastic tiara. George and Harry oohed. The blonde girl who’d been dancing strutted up to Soos’s booth and gave a twinkly wave to the crowd.

“Party Crown? I’ll take it!” she declared.

“Who is that?” Max asked his new friends.

“ _Pacifica Norwich_ ,” Harry spat the name, “The most popular girl in town.”

“Norwich?” he’d seen that name around town before. Norwich hill. Norwich lodge. Nathaniel Norwich High School.

“I always feel worse about myself when she’s around,” George said with surprising candour. “Her family owns the mines. Always has! They call the Norwichs the last Columbia barons. Every new generation lording it over the town worse than the last, grabbing new power and money. It’s a big chain of jerks!”

Soos seemed to screw up some courage before looking at Pacifica. “Actually, I can’t just give it to you. It’s supposed to be a competition,” he said.

Pacifica laughed, tilting Soos’s microphone towards herself. The whole dance floor had stopped to look on her with something like celebrity, or maybe fear.

“Honestly? Who’s going to compete against me?” she said, sweeping the crowd with a manicured hand. Her gaze lingered with amusement on the three boys on the porch, “Lizard guy, maybe? Fork man?”

George and Harry stepped together. The last stirrings of the crush Max had felt for Pacifica evaporated. No one spoke to his friends like that!

Before they could protest, he was onstage next to her, declaring his candidacy for Party King. Then he turned to Pacifica and winked.

“I’m Max,” he said, in a voice calculated so no girl could resist his charms.

“I don’t care,” said Pacifica, not blinking an eye.

Apparently, she could resist his charms. Impressive. 

“May the best partier win!” said Max, skipping away.

She was going down.

Max took to the dance floor again, fuelled by the thrill of revolution against this supposed Columbian baroness. The night became a series of dance-offs between his own wild spirit and Pacifica’s refined agility. He knew he was fighting for the approval of a crowd whose economic and social welfare depended on his opponent’s goodwill. Together, driven by righteous partying fury, they drove the sleepy atmosphere of the night to a frenzy.

* * *

**V**

For some unknowable reason, the sleepy atmosphere of the night had been driven to a frenzy. Wendy was growing increasingly distracted by the commotion of the dance floor. Eventually she could resist it no longer and tapped out on Lyra.

“I’ve got to get in there. Cover for me.” 

Lyra never had time to protest before Wendy was off into the crowd.

She was torn. Duty and love, the oldest triangle in the book. In the parking lot were people hoping to score a ticket. In the field was Wendy, bathing in the music and the deepening night. The latter won out. Lyra scrawled a CLOSED sign on the back of her singular, never-copied ticket sheet, locked the cash box, and left her place to a chorus of protests.

In hindsight, it might have wiser to glance at the gift shop and see if Stan was watching through the window. He was, and moments after vacating her seat, Lyra felt his hand dragging her back by the shirt collar.

“What are you doing, kid?” said Stan, “These suckers aren’t going to rip themselves off. You made a promise.”

“Did I?”

“You did.”

“Right. I did.”

Lyra sullenly took her seat again and admitted the short line that had grown in her brief absence. Stan retreated to the gift shop, halting to glance back at Lyra as he went. She sunk heartlessly back into the job, taking cash, waving people through, and for the most part, just waiting around. And all the while, Wendy was winning hearts on the dance floor. If only she could be in two places at once.

As soon as those words passed through Lyra’s head, the idea began to form. Driving it was a second priority: data, data, data. The flesh printer was still sitting in Stan’s office. Could it copy a full person? What would that look like? Depending on the answer, she could kill two birds with one stone – fill her seat and dance with Wendy. If it was otherwise, at least she’d know.

Keeping a weather eye on the gift shop, Lyra closed her stall again and crept around the house to steal in the kitchen window. Up the stairs she went, timing the creaks to the louder beats of the music outside.

As she curled up on the printer’s enormous scanning bed, hesitation crept in for the first time. She’d been focused on the thrill of discovery, but this was the Frankenstein moment, science without oversight, toying with life. Then the bed lit up. Lyra squeezed her eyes shut.

When she opened them, they were filled with thick tears. Her whole body itched and sweated somehow. Had she been burnt by the laser scanner? Her arms and fingers were stiff as she raised them to her face and wiped her eyes. She was still curled up as she had been, but the bed felt different. 

And then she realized where she was, who she was, and shot up.

She was curled up not on the bed of the machine, but in the printing bay, where the flesh gel oozed into form. Which meant… She pulled herself out of the bay and looked back. There she was – a skinny girl with brown hair, dressed in a tartan skirt, sitting up on the scanner and gazing in amazement at Lyra. No, the girl on the scanner WAS Lyra. But so was she, herself. Except she’d been in the bay, and even now, her skin was flaky and crusted, like just-dried glue. She wasn’t Lyra at all, not anymore. She was the new one.

A million thoughts swarmed in not-Lyra’s head, but two swam to the surface. Apparently, the machine worked. And apparently, memories were preserved in the copy of the brain.

Her insides swam, literally forming anew. Could she even talk? She could at least try.

“How long did it take?” she asked.

“About ten minutes,” said the original Lyra, “You started as a lump of, just sort of, stuff.”

“Like the arm?”

“Yes… Wait! You remember the arm?”

“It was only this morning.”

“Right, but… you remember my life. Our life, I mean.”

“You know when we used to fall asleep in the living room…”

“And wake up in bed? It’s like that?”

“It’s like that. It feels like I just fell asleep over there and woke up here.”

The two Lyras stared at each other for what felt like an eternity. There was little need to speak at all, for each knew the other had to be thinking the same thoughts. Their consciousness had split, but the resulting pair were still based on all the same things. Only the different stimuli of last ten minutes had kept their first conversation from being more than simultaneously expressing the same thoughts. Lyra (either one) knew that if she spoke now, the other would only say the same thing at the same time. This would change in time. As each Lyra was affected by different stimuli, standing in different spots and feeling different currents of air, their trains of thought would diverge from the identical tracks they had to be on now. If there was anyone who knew how different people could end up despite the same starting point, it was a twin. Or were they triplets now?

Until the divergence happened, conversation would be futile, and they needed conversation if the plan with Wendy was to go off smoothly. So, they needed different stimuli. Okay. Lyra would go out into the hallway, and the other one could stay in the office. That would speed things along.

Both Lyras, formulating the same plan, walked towards the door at the same time, walked into each other, and fell to the floor.

Fortunately, chaos theory took hold. As they fell in different positions, each Lyra brought herself to her feet in a different way, rubbing different bruises on different spots. The trains were beginning to diverge.

Their eyes locked.

“So, what do I call you?” said old-Lyra.

New-Lyra knew what she meant. If they were two people now, they needed two names. Technically they already had two names, but they hadn’t drifted so far as to think that either would want to use her dreadful birth name.

“I’ll call you Number Two,” said old-Lyra.

“Definitely not,” said new-Lyra, “How’s about this. You’re Lyr- _a_ …”

“So, you could be Lyre-b?” old-Lyra finished, “Sure, why not. Welcome to the world, Lyre-b. I mean, you already knew the world, I guess, if you have my memories. You just knew it as me. Weird.”

“Weird,” about summed up all of this.

Lyra (Lyr _A_ , the original,) had to entertain a nervous thought. How many movies had she seen where clones turned on their creators? Then again, this was her she was talking about. Though being the original versus the copy made things different. Drift. Was Lyre-b having the same worries?

Then there was the physical difference. Lyre-b was made of whatever water-soluble goop came out of the machine. She could be dispatched like the Wicked Witch of the West, not to draw unfair moral assignments. Lyre-b had to know that, too. It was a power dynamic wordlessly established by birth. Of course, it wouldn’t have to come to taking advantage of that. After all, this was Lyra Lyra was talking about.

Lyra and Lyre-b agreed to leave the kitchen window at different times and cut around the house in different directions. Lyre-b took up Lyra’s old position at the ticket stand. It was a lonely job, especially now that no one else was likely to arrive, but she was willing to endure it for the thought that at least her prime self could score a night with Wendy. Lyra had probably made the same plans as Lyre-B to share Wendy between the two of them, right?

As for Lyra Prime, she was on the party floor. By now the lawn had been thoroughly torn up by dancers. She found Wendy hanging out on the edge of the crowd, leaning against a birch tree.

“Hey!” said Lyra, “I got someone else to watch the table.”

Wendy’s eyes sparked. “Awesome! Robbie just got here. Hey, Robbie, you remember Lyra from the convenience store, right?”

“No,” said Robbie, sulking in the shadows nearby. Lyra hadn’t seen him until just then. His guitar was slung over one shoulder. Who brought a guitar to a party where music was already playing?

But of course, Wendy would swoon for him anyways. That guitar was the club he’d use to shatter Lyra and Wendy’s fireside night she’d imagined so vividly.

Lyra crept away from the two of them back to the parking lot. Lyre-b was hiding halfway there.

“I’m guessing you saw that,” said Lyra.

“And I’m guessing you have the same jealous fantasy I did,” said Lyre-b.

They had to get rid of Robbie, that was beyond discussion. Lyra glanced at Robbie’s bike, leaning on a tree. She didn’t need to communicate the plan. Lyre-b already knew it.

“But I can’t do it and stay at the ticket table,” Lyre-b pointed out.

And so, a short sleep later, Lyre-b woke up in the bay of the flesh printer, skin crawling with drying matter. Two girls, and she knew exactly who, leaned eagerly over her and christened her Lyre-c.

* * *

**VI**

An hour into her and Max’s battle, Pacifica had pulled out the big guns. Max himself had decided that the party needed a karaoke machine, and here she was using it against him. The nerve of her! As she wound down the final warbling notes of a slow, dramatic ballad, the crowd went wild. Pacifica’s campaign for the party crown, and more, for her family’s further uncontested rule of the town, was nearing victory. Well, Max wouldn’t stand for that. 

“Can’t I just put her in a headlock?” said George.

“No,” said Max, “We need to take her down a peg or ten where it matters, and that’s the stage. It’s not over yet, my brothers.”

He came to the stage and Pacifica passed him the microphone with a smug try-and-top-that expression. He didn’t take it right away, instead going to speak to Soos, who was running the karaoke machine out of his DJ booth.

“Soos! I need you to play the most crowd-pleasing, nostalgic, sing-along-able rock ballad you have on the playlist,” said Max.

“I’ve got “Don’t Stop Believing” here,” said Soos.

“Perfect.”

He took up the mic, readied himself for the opening lines as the iconic intro set cheers going, and fixed a glare on Pacifica. _Just a small town girl, living in a lonely world…_

Maybe he’d do a flip off the stage after the chorus. He tried and fell on his face in the torn-up grass. Quick as he could, spitting mud, he scrambled back up to grab the mic where it’d fallen.

“That was for you guys!” Max wheezed, aware he’d missed a couple of lines in his theatrics.

When he was done, the crowd was roused like nothing the Mystery Shack had likely ever seen. Soos let the cheers die down for a while, not daring to interrupt by returning to the playlist.

Eventually, though, Lyra crept up to Soos’s booth and whispered something to him. He said into his microphone, “Attention. Will the owner of a silver and red fixie report to the parking lot! Your bike is being stolen!”

There was a commotion from the edge of the woods. Max recognized Robbie, from the convenience store, rushing towards the parking lot. He left Wendy, who had been standing with him, quite bewildered. Max hopped off the stage and went over to watch her.

Lyra came to Wendy’s side a moment later and leaned against a nearby tree. “Tough break,” she said, glancing at Robbie’s fleeing silhouette, “I wonder who that was.”

Of course. This had Lyra written all over it. Max would have to ask her later how she’d pulled it off. The why of it was obvious enough.

Apparently wanting to bring down the reckless energy of the party after Pacifica and Max’s twin karaoke ballads, Soos started up his playlist again with some gentle guitar chords, overlaid with a sort of breezy chanting.

As the lyrics faded in, Wendy swayed her head to the beat and said, “Oh, man. I love this song.”

Max went over and nudged Lyra. “Hey, doofus. This is your chance to…” She elbowed him back, so he repeated himself in a whisper. “Now’s your chance to ask Wendy to dance.”

Lyra nodded and looked over to Wendy, lost in the music and the night. Then she bolted towards the parking lot.

* * *

**VII**

“Oh, you were right to run,” Lyre-b agreed as she and her parallel paced the road, “Obviously you couldn’t have just asked her to dance like that.”

“Right,” said Lyra, “What if Stan came out? Robbie came back? The next song was awful? The dance floor is a minefield. A minefield, B.”

“There’s too many variables,” Lyre-b agreed.

Well, they were scientists. Controlling variables was in the job description. But they couldn’t do it alone.

They ironed out the Wendy Plan 2.0 as Lyre-d was printed. They needed one guard to watch for Stan and another for Robbie. Lyre-c still hadn’t returned from leading Robbie on a wild bike chase, and she could very well be halfway across town by now, so they needed Lyre-d to have those roles filled.

Then, because they were scientists, knowing the value of redundancy and already half drunk on party air and discovery, they decided to make a Lyre-e. As she printed, they got to discussing whether printed clothes were different from the factory-made ones Lyra was wearing. Lyra and Lyre-b switched socks and shoes to check. They didn’t feel any different.

Unfortunately, there was only so much Stuff in the machine. The nozzles spluttered out shortly before they usually stopped. The clump of stuff did its best to form into a girl, and mostly succeeded, but Lyre-e was like a piece of paper from a printer low on ink. Her skin was discoloured in a dozen shades and rumpled like she’d been pulled from a paper jam. Her limbs were stunted, and her eyes were empty. She woke up and let out a screech that was somehow both pitiful and horrifying.

“Yikes,” said Lyra.

“You’re not making me partner up with her, are you?” Lyre-d whispered.

“Don’t be rude,” said Lyre-b, and went to welcome Lyre-e into the world. “Hey, buddy! How’s it… oh, yeesh.” Lyre-e’s skin hadn’t sealed as that of the other copies had, and Lyre-b’s hand came away coated in a layer of slime.

Lyre-e was carried up to the attic and left in Lyra’s bed. The others had no idea what to do with her, since they’d found no way to communicate with her. Then the three came down separately, and the plan was a go. Lyre-d was to hang out in the parking lot and watch for Robbie, Lyre-b was to watch Stan in the gift shop, and in the event that Lyre-c returned, she could make sure Soos kept a good playlist going. The two set out, wishing Lyra good luck.

“I don’t need luck,” she said, “I have a plan. And I have you guys.”

And then, as she was passing through the gift shop back to the party, Lyra came to a halt.

“Wendy!” she said, “What are you doing in here?”

“Just waiting on the bathroom,” said Wendy.”

“Oh,” said Lyra, “All right.” She poured herself a half-cup of Pitt, to stall near her. Small talk, small talk. Lyra was blanking on all her conversation starters.

“Hey,” said Wendy, gesturing to the window, “Let’s say everyone at this party gets stranded on a desert island. Who leads the tribe? I’m thinking Mr. Polchik.”

“Who?” said Lyra.

“Oh, right, you’re from out of town,” Wendy pointed to a toned, sweaty man, “That guy. He’s the head lifeguard at the pool.”

“So he’s a good swimmer? He can catch the tribe fish?”

“Right, and he’s a buffed-up psycho, so he can rule with an iron fist.”

“That makes sense,” said Lyra and indicated the tallest man on the lawn, “But fish are hard to catch. I’d go with stretch over there. Tall people get coconuts, win the hearts of the tribe.”

“You want to talk about tall!” said Wendy, taking her wallet from her jeans, “Check out this old family picture.”

She showed Lyra a little photograph of some red-headed boys sitting on a log, her thumb deliberately covering the side of the picture. “Those are my brothers, and I’m…” Wendy raised her thumb to reveal her younger self, pimply-faced and a head above the next tallest Cordon sibling.

Lyra laughed. “Wow! You were…”

“A freak? Yeah.”

“No, just… Tall.”

“Freakishly tall.”

“Maybe,” Lyra admitted, “But hey, people used to tease me about my scars.”

Wendy gave her a curious glance, and Lyra immediately regretted what she’d said.

“Scars?” asked Wendy.

“Never mind,” said Lyra.

“No way, dude. Now you have to show me! I mean, if you want to. It’s cool. I get it.”

But she’d said it, and it’d be lame to back out now. Lyra let out a breath and swept her bangs up from her forehead. There, stretching from her left temple over her eye, were two deep, looping grooves in her skin. Between her ear and her hairline, they crossed over three times, making a stretched-out parallelogram and smaller triangle above that. A discolored blotch marked one corner of the triangle.

Wendy leaned in to look, saying nothing. Then she went to the nearby display stand of books and flipped open a sky chart in a camping guide. There it was, a triangle and a parallelogram, between Cygnus and Hercules in the summer sky.

“ _Lyra_ ,” she said, “Wow. How’d you get it?”

“Born with them,” said Lyra, “Max came out first, and his umbilical cord was wrapped around my head. Twice, overlapping.” She traced the scars all around her skull to show. “It was cutting off blood to my brain. They weren’t sure if I’d make it.”

“But you did.”

“Yeah.”

“And so, they named you after it.”

“No.”

“No?”

“I wasn’t Lyra until second grade, when we looked at constellations in school. They were already making fun of the scars, and now that they were shaped like something, I had a name. I hated it at first. I hated it for a while. But I had to get used to it, ‘cause everyone used it, even teachers. I think it took reading _The Golden Compass_ a few years later for me to be cool with it.”

“No way. That’s wild. What’s your real name then?”

Lyra almost told her, and it caught in her throat. She couldn’t bring herself to say it. It was such an old lady name. A kittens-and-doilies sort of name. And it was ugly to say, two earthy Germanic syllables that sunk in the mouth. _Lyra_ was so much more romantic in the linguistic and colloquial senses, lifting off the tongue like a free-flying bird.

“Never mind,” said Wendy, “I get it. The name you’ve been using half your life has got to be just as real as what you were born with, right? I mean, we all show ourselves as who we want to be.” Wendy raised her solo cup and said, “Here’s to being freaks together!”

They toasted and drank.

Right then, the bathroom was free. A pretty, preppy-looking blonde girl came out, half-snarling and dabbing at her eyes.

“What are you looking at!” she snapped at Lyra, “You’re the one spinning some sob story about scars!” The teary girl marched to the dance floor. Wendy shrugged and went into the bathroom.

Once the door was clicked shut, Lyra ran back into the living room, where Lyre-d was waiting tersely, tapping her foot. Lyre-b accompanied her.

“What kept you?” said Lyre-d, “I’ve been waiting for ten minutes.”

“You wouldn’t believe it!” said Lyra, “I ran into Wendy in the shop and we just got talking. Went great! I even… I showed her our scars.” That seemed hard to believe now. She spent so much time sweeping her hair to cover the lyre, Wendy of all people ought not to know about it. But maybe that was the sort of personal story fledgling couples were meant to share, right? The others would have to get that. Lyra thought they did, since their own hands went to their own scars.

“That’s great,” said Lyre-d after a short while, “But may I remind you that it’s not the plan?”

“Right… Yeah, I know, but… Maybe we don’t need the plan?”

“What!”

Lyre-b tapped her foot. “No offense, A, but we spent all this time on the plan… Bit rude to just ditch it now, isn’t it? Shouldn’t someone who sticks to the plan get the first dance?”

“I agree with me,” said Lyre-d, “Anyways, what makes you special? Because you’re made of skin? We’re all the same person.”

“Come on guys,” said Lyra, “We promised we wouldn’t turn on each other.”

But they’d all been lying, and they all knew it.

The two printed Lyras grabbed their progenitor and hauled her up the stairs. She was thrown into the linen closet and locked there. To their credit, the copies were gentle captors. Lyre-b fetched Lyra a book, a headlamp, and a chocolate bar before enclosing her.

“Help!” Lyra cried, “I can’t breathe in here!”

“Yes, you can,” said Lyre-d, “Eat your chocolate bar and let us be.”

She did so sullenly and listened to the other girls discussing outside. It sounded like a single person talking to herself, which in a way, it was.

“So now that Lyra Classic is out, I figure I should get the first dance with Wendy,” said one, “I’ve been around longest so it should be me. I mean, logically speaking. Right?”

“Fair enough,” said the other, obviously Lyre-d, “Counterpoint! I’m the youngest, sort of, so it should be me!”

“I don’t see the logic there, no.”

“Well! If it’s who’s been around the longest, we might as well give it to Classic, and we can’t do that! So, it has to be me. Done.”

“What!”

“What yourself!” Lyre-d shouted.

Then there came a horrid, garbled shriek and a pause.

“B, did you let her out… Hey there, E! Buddy! You want this chocolate bar? Here, you can… Oh my god. She doesn’t have a mouth, it’s just, like, an indentation. Creepy. No offense.”

“Hey,” Lyre-b mused, “If you were locked in a closet, what would you do?”

“Pick the lock with my pocketknife,” said Lyre-d.

They looked from each other to down the hall for the first time. Lyra stood stock-still, halfway to the stairs, under their gaze.

The copies moved first, and that head start let them tackle Lyra halfway down the stairs.

“Guys!” she cried, “We can’t fight. Think about it. We’re exact equals. It’d just go on until we’re all beat.”

The others retreated, considering this. That moment’s hesitation was all Lyra needed to leap in and punch Lyre-d out of the way.

All four Lyras looked on incredulous.

With that one blow, the walls were down. The three full-formed Lyras rushed for each other in an aimless frenzy. Lyre-e stood by the side and garbled on incomprehensibly.

It was probably the strangest fight Lyra would ever be in. It was also the first real fight she’d ever been in, which made every action from every party, and every defense, an on-the-spot improvisation. Lyra and Lyre-d squared off and boxed, each laying a few gentle blows on her other self, but mostly blocking. Slowly. though, they made their way back up the stairs. Lyra took a punch openly, letting it spin her towards Lyre-b, and then shoved the two copies together to fight. Both likely thinking they were facing Lyra, the copies fought. No one there was all too eager to actually injure any of herselves, however, and there was predictably no gainable advantage.

Lyra ducked away to the upstairs bathroom, throwing herself against the door to keep the others out. But there were three of them, and one of her. The door flew open, and the copies rounded on the original. A solid blow sent Lyra spinning into the shower. Another came forth and grabbed her by the front of the shirt, ready to drag her away. Lyra was hissing at her to be careful, because… When she slipped, and fell against the shower handle, twisting it around and sending out a spray of cold well-water.

The copies were water-soluble.

The copy holding Lyra sprang back, away from the deadly spray. But the head was misaligned, and the shower was spraying onto the bathroom floor. Lyre-e noticed first, as her discoloured printed shoes began to dissolve. She set the alarm with a pitiful moan as the water-inundated flesh spread up her shins.

Lyra Prime forgotten, the others fled, slamming the door behind them. It was too late. Not only was some water already leaking under the door, but they were already wet, and where dissolution began, it spread, mercilessly.

Lyra stood in the shower and let the water soak her nice clothes. She didn’t want to see what was happening outside. It had to be done, but she didn’t want to see it. Morbid curiosity wasn’t enough to make her watch her own death. Was this suicide or murder? She wasn’t sure. It was exploiting a biological advantage. She squeezed her eyes shut and knocked her head against the shower stall to drown out her own last knells.

As soon as she could, Lyra shut off the shower and went into the hall.

Printer flesh oozed between the soaked floorboards. Lyre-b stood among the mess, water on the soles of her shoes. Lyra’s shoes. They’d switched. The shoes on Lyra’s own feet were puddling now.

The first and last two Lyras locked eyes, and a silent understanding passed between them, not yet so diverged that they needed to say it. She would have done the same.

Without a further word, they went up to the attic and stared out the window at the lawn below. The party was beginning to wind down. Max was trying to start a dance circle. And over by the trees, Robbie had returned, bike in hand, and was chatting up Wendy. She threw back her head and laughed at something he’d said.

Lyra and Lyre-b’s eyes locked, sharing the weight of the last few minutes. They slumped against the wall and sank to the dusty floor. For a long time, they just sat there, watching the porthole in the triangle of the far wall.

“Want to grab a pop and hang out on the bluffs?” said Lyre-b.

* * *

**VIII**

Eleven o’clock loomed nigh. The last fateful hour before midnight would be the era of the Party Monarch. King or Queen would be decided now.

Max found Pacifica in the crowd and said, “You know, whoever wins this thing, it’s been a really fun night, right?”

Pacifica gave a fitful glance around before saying, loudly, “Oh, how cute. It thinks it’s going to win. Hey, do you hear the people clapping for the weird guy from the creepy shack? Me neither.”

Soos held out his arms level and announced, “The applause-o-meter will decide the bestowing of the crown. Our first contender: Let’s hear it for Max! PINES!”

Max jumped onstage and threw up his arms. The crowd erupted, maybe not as loudly as it could have. A cursory scan showed Max that Stan, Wendy, Harry, and George were yelling themselves hoarse for him, which was all that really mattered. But where was Lyra?

Soos’s left hand swung upwards with the volume of the applause.

“Not bad, not bad at all… and our other contestant, Pacificaaaaa NORWICH!”

Editorials could have been written about the trademark Norwich gaze, and probably had. It was a steeling of the cold blue eyes that somehow called to mind Norwich Resources Incorporated, Norwich Realty, Nathaniel Norwich’s legacy, all the other strings that ran from that iron chain of the town’s rulers.

There was no way Soos could skew the results of the following clamour. His right hand went up and up on the tide of townspeople.

Max could hardly blame them. They were saving their livelihoods. But he could certainly blame her.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner,” Soos bitterly announced. He held out the party crown for Pacifica to kneel and be anointed.

Pacifica confidently took the crown from Soos and, like Napoleon declaring himself above the Pope, placed it on her own head. Then she took his microphone.

“Thank you, José,” she bubbled, “Thank you everyone! This has been a great time. Let’s keep it going all night! There’s an even better party to be had at the Lodge. Everyone here is invited!”

That was a lie, obviously. No Shacker would be welcome there.

Max hid himself out of sight as the partygoers followed their blonde pied piper away from the Mystery Shack. The few stragglers that remained trickled away, sensing that the night was over.

Harry and George stood awkwardly on the beat-up grass. Max shambled up to them.

“You guys should go to the new party,” he said, “They’ll probably have them all summer. At least, whenever we do, to show that they can do it better.”

Harry and George nodded to each other.

“Maybe,” said Harry, “But I think the parties here will be more fun. And this one is not over yet, is it?”

Mas grinned. No, it wasn’t.

* * *

**IX**

The gentle limestone bluffs rose up out of the woods a half-kilometer behind the Mystery Shack. Lyra and Lyre-b strolled there and scrambled the rocks by last twilight’s light. From the cliffs, they could look over the cedars to the lights and rooftops of town. The smell of pinesap and distant river air carried on the warm night wind. Bats flittered in whirligig patterns amid the canopy. Crickets buzzed.

“Hell of a night, eh?” said Lyre-b.

They reclined onto the rock ledge. Lyra cracked open the can of Pitt she’d brought. As she took her first sip, a meteor streaked just over the dim outline of the mountains.

“Make a wish,” Lyre-b joked, knowing neither of them put stock in that sort of thing. Max did. She hoped he’d seen it too.

What would Lyra wish for? Love? That’d be an easy one, but too general even for the stars. Did she just want a lithe feminine body to kiss and caress? Or did she want someone to know her, to tend her secrets and understand her? If it was the latter, she had that, sitting next to her, wearing her face and carrying her memories.

“Do you think we even have a chance with Wendy?” said Lyra, passing the soda to her companion. “I mean. We’re fourteen. She’s eighteen. We don’t even know if she likes girls.”

“I don’t know,” said Lyre-b, and took a sip, “But we’re not making any progress the way we’re going. The only good conversation any of us had was when you showed her your scars and didn’t bother with the list.”

“Yeah,” said Lyra. “Maybe I do get in my own way.”

“Oh, god. Don’t tell me this is one of those moments that feels like a metaphor.”

Lyre-b screwed up her face.

“What?” said Lyra.

“Hey, A? You ever forget about something you really shouldn’t?”

Lyra didn’t need to answer. She looked from Lyre-b to the can in her hand, the can she’d been drinking from.

“Oh, no.”

“Yep.”

“B, we can fix this somehow. Stay with me!”

Lyre-b shuddered for a long time, and then gave a great dry heave. When next she looked to Lyra, there were tears in her eyes and a trickle of something grey-red running from the corner of her mouth.

“I had a good run,” she choked out, “At least I won’t be the last of us. I don’t think I’m going to get stuck in the ghost field. I’ve got no reason too.”

“B!”

“Don’t be such a wimp around Wendy, eh? Hey… I’ll find out where the people in the field were supposed to be going. That’s the best piece of data yet.”

Her shirt was melting now, liquid running down to her waist and legs.

“Remember me, Lyra. I’m not the only one who knows you like you.”

“I… Okay.”

Then the water reached her throat and she spoke no more. In the falling night, Lyra couldn’t see the last spark leave her eyes.

Lyra reached over and lifted a can of Pitt from a puddle of weird liquid that rapidly drained away down the bluffs. She poured out the rest of the can in Lyre-b’s memory, and held onto the empty, because she didn’t want to litter.

She was alone now. In a way she had been before, but now she was really, truly alone. It was okay. She watched the stars come out for a while, but it was chilly on the bluffs, and she began to crave company.

Lyre-b had been right. She wasn’t the last of Lyra’s other selves. The last and the first was still down at the Shack, dancing his heart out.

She scrambled down the bluffs and made her way through the dark woods. Soft light through the pines led her home.

Lyra found Max and two other boys on the lawn. Soos had vacated his DJ booth and Wendy was nowhere to be seen.

“They went home,” Max explained, “No one was here to DJ for. By the way, have you met my new pals? This is Harry, and George.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m Lyra. Think of me as Max-b.”

Max put on one of his Beatles CDs. The opening sound was the simulated noise of a restaurant music stand tuning up. That meant it was _Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band_ , forty minutes of the Fab Four’s best beats.

The four of them danced past midnight.

* * *

**X**

That night in the attic:

“I didn’t want to talk about it with the other guys around,” said Lyra as she crawled into bed, “But I have to tell you what happened to me tonight.”

“Me too,” said Max.

“Okay, you go first.”

He did. When he finished, all Lyra could say was, “She sounds like a real piece of work.”

“Yeah,” said Max, “First Delilah and now Pacifica. We seem to be making a lot of enemies.”

“But, a lot of friends, too.”

“Well I can tell you one thing. She won the battle tonight, but the war’s just beginning. I’m going to take her down if it takes all summer. Anyways, what was your story?”

She told him.

Max was quiet for a while afterwards. Eventually he said, “Yours is better. Why are your stories always better?”

“Probably because I look for things.”

Max pondered this, then slipped out of bed and down the ladder.

He returned a while later with a satisfied smile and said, “it’s done.”

“What’s done?”

“I broke the clone machine. Stabbed it in the scanner with the big knife from the kitchen.”

“What! But why?”

“Because that’s how these things always end. You’re supposed to destroy the machine because the power is too dangerous.”

“No, no! There was so much more I could have investigated!”

“Well, investigate something else,” said Max, “Tomorrow. We’ll find something new tomorrow. Good night.”

_Masi-d zuymf hu up vu menopevi jistimg epf mowi e jeqqa vsewimis’t mogi._

_Succoi piwis huv jot coli cedl._


	6. Book Six: The Maple Leaf For Never

**I**

**July 8**

The Pines rose late on Sunday morning and set to cleaning the mess of the party. For the most part there was little to do but pick litter off the lawn and scrub the gift shop floor of pop stains, but Stan did find a rotten egg broken on the porch steps. There was tiny writing on what was left of the shell, which seemed to read “Stanford – Lyra – Maximilian” repeatedly. Stan tossed this out and didn’t mention it again.

The Shack had also been emptied of a good amount of food, so they drove into town to buy groceries. On the way home, the twins ripped open a brand-new bag of corn chips as the Stanmobile came to a gridlock crossing main street. Max found that the chips were perfectly shaped that he could hold them in his ears. He did so, and promptly forgot they were there. Lyra had to resist pointing them out for the greater pleasure of seeing how long he would leave them in.

Main Street was still blocked. Stan leaned on the horn and shouted, “Come on, clear the intersection! Who’s got the… stagecoach?”

“Stagecoach?” said Lyra, leaning out the window. Indeed, a wooden carriage was hitched to a pair of draft horses in the middle of the road.

“Wait!” said Stan, “It’s the first Sunday after Canada Day. Oh, no. It’s Prospector’s Day!”

“Prospector’s Day?” said Max.

“That’s right. Every year these yahoos dress up in old-timey costumes, close the street, and celebrate the day Gravity Falls was founded.”

“That sounds fun!” said Max.

“It’s not. It’s hot and crowded and they try to sell you overpriced food in fake accents. And you have to suffer the speeches."

“That sounds fun,” Lyra agreed. Stan signalled for a U-turn, but before he could go anywhere, Lyra and Max had their doors open.

“What are you doing?” said Stan.

“We’re checking out the festival,” said Max, “See you back at the Shack for dinner, maybe.”

Stan rolled his eyes. “You’ll be back soon. There’s nothing to see here. But suit yourself. Just know that if you come back to the Shack talking like these nuts, you’re dead to me.”

“Criminy, and swab my haversack!” said Lyra, just as Max shouted, “Gadzooks! There’s a carpet bagger in the turnip cellar!”

“Dead to me!” said Stan, but he cracked a smile. “Alright, be safe. Eh, Lyra?”

“Yeah?”

“You planning some wild ghost chase today?”

“Not really.” She shifted so that he couldn’t see the Journal tucked inside her vest.

“Great. Go be a normal kid. Steal a pie, flirt with a boy.”

Lyra nodded and began to step out. Just as the twins’ shoes were hitting asphalt, Max said, “Actually, Gruncle Stan, Lyra’s figured out she’s a lesbian.”

Lyra shoved her fist in her mouth, not to stifle herself, but to keep it from landing in Max’s face.

“Really,” said Stan.

“Yep,” said Max, “About as straight as a curly straw. See you tonight!”

Stan and Lyra’s eyes locked. The door slammed. He drove away.

Lyra looked to her brother once her blood had cooled to a simmer. All she could say was, “Why?”

“Because he’s family and I trust him,” said Max, “You should try it sometime.”

“I was going to tell him myself, you know.”

“When?”

“At the right time!”

“When would that be?”

“I don’t know! Not now!”

“Why not?”

“I don’t– Ugh! I don’t know. Forget it.”

Max kicked at the curb as they mounted the sidewalk.

“I’m sorry, Lyra. Really. I didn’t think it was like that.”

Lyra sniffed. “It’s okay.”

“Do you want me to tell him I was joking?”

“Naw. It’s fine. He knows now. He would have had to find out eventually if, you know.”

“If I know what?”

“Well, you know. Um. Wendy.”

“Oh! Right! Yeah, that’d be funny. My niece is dating my cashier? Perfectly straight thing to do. Makes sense.”

Lyra forgave him with a quick side-hug around the shoulders. Then, with that resolved, they remembered why they’d gotten out of the car and went to the corner of Main Street for a look around.

Gravity Falls’ historic downtown, with its picturesque main street of Edwardian-era brick shops, was charming at any time. Absent traffic, with people strolling the road and jaunty ragtime music playing, it was postcard-perfect to the point of period-piece surrealism. The stagecoach they’d seen was giving rides for a toonie up and down the street. There were booths along the sidewalks where shops sponsored historic activities and souvenirs. Lyra saw candle dipping, gold panning, a booth on local animals (if only they knew!), tire-sur-neige, and bannock with saskatoon jam. 

Eventually the twins found a schedule posted on a door. To their delight, they found that the opening ceremonies were to be at the courthouse within the next half-hour. Beyond that there was free admission to the museum and some musical performances at Station Park.

A stage had been set up in front of the courthouse, nicely framing the gothic building. A Red Ensign flew where the maple leaf would have normally. The portly sheriff and his big-eared deputy were onstage, the latter ringing a cowbell with joyous abandon. Elsewhere on the stage sat a couple with a blonde daughter. The girl cringed at every loud peal of the bell.

Max was grinding his teeth. “That’s her,” he said.

“Who?” said Lyra. He didn’t answer.

The ringing increased its frequency as the family took centre stage. They were the most put-together people Lyra had ever seen in real life, even in fringed voyageur vests of fake deerskin. To her surprise, the girl approached the microphone. Lyra recognized her then – she’d stormed out of the bathroom in front of her last night.

“Good morning, and happy Prospector’s Day!” she cried, “My name is Pacifica Norwich, great-great-granddaughter of our great town’s founder, Nathaniel Norwich. It’s an honour to be here today and see the wonderful community that he built, and it’s been an honour to be a part of that community. The Norwich family has been a driver of community and local culture for generations. The prospector’s spirit that inspired my great-great-grandfather to make this place home lives on in the community that chooses that today. But don’t take it from me! Let’s hear from the Gravity Falls community! If you’ve got the prospector’s spirit, come on up and tell us what this place means to you!”

Five times. She’d said the word “community” five times in the space of a minute.

“Audience participation!” said Max, “I’m going!”

He pushed through the crowd and hurdled onto the stage before Lyra could get a word in. 

Pacifica’ smile dropped as she noticed Max. He pointedly ignored her and took the microphone.

“Hi!” he said, “I’m Max, from Colling…”

He was pulled away from the stand before he could finish. Pacifica’s father began a speech, but Lyra wasn’t listening. She pushed to the rail to listen in as Pacifica spoke to Max in hushed tones.

“Listen,” she said, “We take our heritage – my heritage – seriously around here. You will not besmirch it by making a circus out of my stage in your… What are you even wearing?”

“It’s a puppy playing basketball,” said Max, indicating the felt patches on his shirt, “I made it myself. Do you want one? I could make a symbol for stuck-up drama queen.”

“It’s ridiculous. Are you always so silly?”

“I can be serious!”

“You have nachos in your ears, hon.”

Max shook and clenched his fists. Then he marched up to the microphone and seized it from Pacifica’s father.

A scuffle ensued, which ended with Max being hauled off the stage by the pair of Mounties.

“How embarrassing for you,” Pacifica smiled down at him, and skipped back to rejoin her family. Max went back to Lyra’s side, scowling, and pulled her gently out of the crowd.

They came to rest not far away, on the plinth of a statue where the lawn met the sidewalk. Lyra glanced up at the bronze figure of a thickly bearded man in a Victorian suit, surveying the street with a sharp eye. NATHANIEL NORWICH – EXPLORER – PROSPECTOR – TOWN FOUNDER, read the plaque. 

“You okay?” said Lyra, resting a hand on Max’s shoulder.

“Yeah,” he sniffed, “I think we should buy some butter tarts. That’d help.”

Lyra agreed. They set off to look.

* * *

**II**

Railway Street was no better for escaping town than Main. The parade that morning had left the dirt road a deep slick of mud and manure, and the poor old Stanmobile spun her tires to no effect. Horse apples flew up behind Stan’s back windshield, making his dear El Camino smell like an uncleaned stable.

Stan rolled down the window and called to a passing man guiding a mule. “Hey! Donkey boy! Can you give me a push?”

The guy put on an unconvincing bewildered expression and said, “Why, what magic is this in this year of 1894! Pray, sir, what is this horseless carriage of yours?”

“Christ’s sake, Pete, you’re a mechanic. Cut it out.”

“Cut? I’m not familiar with this bold new expression.”

Stan grabbed Pete by the collar and screamed, “What have they done to you? We’re all getting dumber every minute we spend here!”

Two other pairs of feet squelched through the mud. Stan had chosen his moment poorly. Sheriff Blubs and Deputy Durland were patrolling the road and huffed in to intervene.

Stan let go of Steve’s shirt and reclined in his seat. “Oh, joy. You must be the Nor’westers today. You gonna throw me in the stockade?”

“We just might,” said Blubs. Durland rang his cowbell accusingly.

“Come on, you’ve got no charges.”

“The charge!” Blubs recited, “Is disrespecting the Prospector’s Day spirit. The sentence is to be the prospector’s fool in the stocks.”

“You’re kidding, obviously. Hey, can you help me move my car?”

They weren’t kidding. Ten minutes later Stan had his neck and hands locked in the stocks in Sawyer Plaza, just off main street.

People strolled by, stopped to look at him, or looked without stopping, and giggled. He roared at them, and the kids just laughed louder. They thought he was an act in the great circus the town had become for this hellish day.

Then, as if to confirm he was in hell, the devil came by. She wore a can-can dress and her ice-white hair was piled high on her head. She looked at Stan with a hand on one hip and a bucket of fresh tomatoes braced on the other.

“Stanford Pines!” Delilah drawled in her insufferable Mississippi twang, “Looks like the snake oil man’s in his place at last. They do always get their man, they say!”

“Piss off, kid.”

Delilah struck an innocent expression. “Such vulgarity! Why, Stanford, I’m just a humble tomato farmer peddling my wares! Let’s hope I don’t drop too many.”

A soft, ripe tomato hit Stan in the forehead. Passersby laughed, thinking it another act.

“They are so, so slippery,” said Delilah.

“If I weren’t in these stocks, I’d throttle you! You… Hey, did you come to the party at the Shack last night?”

“Why ever would I want to do that?”

“’cause someone threw a rotten egg on my porch.”

“Whoever would do such a thing?” said Delilah, “Who and why? Happy Prospector’s Day!”

And she was off, skipping and whistling a ragtime ditty.

* * *

**III**

“Lyra, can I ask you something?”

Lyra stopped chewing and sat alert. They were sitting on the steps of the train station, listening to a distant ragtime quartet on the bandstand, eating butter tarts out of waxcloth. It wasn’t typical of Max to start a conversation so solemnly.

“Sure,” she said.

“Do you think I’m silly?” said Max.

“No, of course not,” said Lyra, and even she could hear how unconvincing she was.

“I knew it,” said Max, “The sweaters, all the randomness. I thought it was charming and quirky! Do people just see me as a big joke?”

Max stared at the ground for a moment, then pulled his sweatshirt over his head and reefed the sleeves around his waist. It hung with the felt puppy facing in, unseen.

“Come on, Max. You love that shirt!”

“I used to. Pacifica ruined it, like she ruins everything.”

“You only met her last night.”

“Yeah, but from everything I’ve heard, that’s what she does. That’s what her whole family does. She’s descended from old Nathaniel, so I guess that gives her the right.”

“It doesn’t.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

Then Lyra remembered.

“Wait!” she said, “I think I read something about Nathaniel Norwich in you-know-where. Let me check!”

“You brought it with you? To buy groceries?”

“Just in case, you know?” Lyra opened her vest and retrieved the Journal with the caution it commanded. She flipped through it for a minute, coming to rest on a page spread with a taped-in note.

“Listen to this. _In my investigations into…_ ”

“Lyra?”

“What?”

“Why are you reading in an accent? Are we just assuming this was written by a baritone British man?”

“Was I? Sorry. I’ll just read normal.”

“Please.”

“Anyways, as I was saying…”

_In my investigations into t[?????]ver[??????]co[?????] of the secrets of GB I have found a new clue. I got myself arrested to sneak into the police station and tracked the most confidential files. Nothing on [??]nd[?????]r[??] but very old file labeled “Norwich Coverup 1896”. This is a new wrinkle. Perhaps the prospector who founded GB is not as he seems? Managed to snag only one sheet from the file. Cannot crack code. Perhaps C[???????]an h[????]_

On the opposite page, scotch tape held down a yellowed piece of paper. Lyra gingerly loosed it from its longtime holdings and unfolded it.

No wonder the Author hadn’t been able to crack the code. It scarcely even looked like a code. It was no simple cipher or invented alphabet. Triangles and circles and strange swooping lines arced and scattered across the page, ending abruptly or suddenly changing. And yet, it was no doodle. It wasn’t artistic. There was an order to it, an evident care given to the placement of each pen stroke.

“Any idea?” said Max.

“No,” said Lyra, “But isn’t this exciting! If we crack this conspiracy, Pacifica’s whole family are a bunch of frauds!”

“Yes!” Max rubbed his hands gleefully, “And no one will ever call me silly again! Conspiracies are serious, right?”

“Oh, definitely serious. And the Mystery Twins are on the case!”

“I thought you hated the Mystery Twins thing.”

“It’s growing on me,” said Lyra, tucking the Journal away and getting up for the walk to the place all mystery hunts began.

The Gravity Falls Public Library was tucked into an old post office just off Main Street. As soon as they entered, the woman at the desk asked, “Are you here to put on a Prospector’s Day program?”

“No,” said Lyra, “We’re just researching a project.”

“Thank heavens,” said the librarian, “Rosalyn McGasket tried to volunteer for a pioneer storytime about how explorers drew sustenance from stories around the campfire. She told the children to eat the books!”

Lyra nodded and was about to sequester herself in a back table when she had a thought. “Excuse me, ma’am, not to be rude, but how old are you?”

The librarian blinked. “I’m forty-six.”

“Hm. Younger side, but it could work. May I see your hand? Both hands? And ask your name?”

The befuddled librarian told her name and held up her hands. Ordinary hands. Five fingers each.

“Thank you,” said Lyra, and dashed away.

“What was that about?” said Max as they took seats in a corner table among the shelves.

Lyra took out the Journal and split its back endpaper with a vertical line. On one side she wrote the librarian’s name, and on the other, _possible – not likely._

“Finding the Author,” she explained, “Since the Journal is thirty years old, it could be anyone older than fifty-ish.”

“Any other clues?”

“Other than the hand, and the fact that they know the town, not really.”

They split up. Max was to seek out a crash course in the life of Nathaniel Norwich and the founding of the town, while Lyra, more the cryptologist, would focus on deciphering the document from the Journal.

It was immediately obvious that treating the sheet like a typical cipher would yield little result. There was no obvious orientation, with lines sprawling and curling about the page, and few symbols ever repeated themselves

Lyra set to work confronting the Dewey Decimal System. Cryptology and codebreaking was her destination. Was that a social science? A cruise through that section revealed little, but she did take note of a thin volume that she slipped into her vest alongside the Journal. Eventually in the reference section, a thick _Dictionary of Symbols_ revealed itself. Lyra hauled this back to the table and began to compare the Author’s sheet with its list of alphabets. The sheet clearly wasn’t Egyptian hieroglyphs, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, or Hindi. That left only about a thousand more obscure possibilities. It wasn’t Hebrew, Tamil, or Thai. 

Triangles. She needed to look for scripts with triangles. It might have been an Indonesian script called Lontara, but when she tried forcing a line to its equivalent Lontara syllabary, she got a burst of phonetic gibberish with no vowels. Anyways, what were the odds that an Indonesian language would find its way into nineteenth-century British Columbia? She ought to look for something closer to home. With that in mind, she sought out a pair of Cree and Inuktitut dictionaries. They had plenty of triangles. But once again, nothing.

Lyra leaned back on her chair and massaged her temples. The feel of her scars got her thinking about constellations and astronomy. Perhaps it wasn’t an alphabet at all – the way the ink scattered at random, it was more like a set of lines drawn in a starry sky. Maybe the sheet would map to the night sky at a certain date!

It didn’t.

When Max met her some time later, Lyra was thoroughly sick of looking at the yellowed old document. Maybe it really was just scribbles.

Max hadn’t found anything telling in the recorded histories either.

“It’s the usual story for this area,” he said, “Up until the 1880s, no one was here but the occasional Ktunaxa summer hunting party. And the fairies, I guess, but that’s not in the books. Nathaniel Norwich was a prospector from Edmonton who came through the mountains after Confederation, before the railway. He dug a mine under a hill he named for himself and built a lodge on top of it. Then the old town around the mines got washed away in a landslide and the new one was built here. There’s just a little note that says… hang on… “Norwich’s original claims and property, among further acquired holdings, remain in his family today.” So, there you go. Oh, and I figured out why that egg was on our porch.”

“Eh?”

He slid over a paperback titled _Mississippi_ _Voodoo Tricks_ and opened it to a section on “How to Make Someone Go Away.” Lyra read:

_Write nine times on a rotten egg the names of the people you want to leave a place. Throw it against the door of the place at midnight._

“Huh,” said Lyra, “Weird. What made you think of that?”

“Well, who do we know that’s from Mississippi, likes magic and weird stuff, and hates our guts?”

“I don’t… Oh! Delilah! You think she came to the party and tried to cast a spell on us?”

“I’d bet my grappling hook on it. Don’t worry, though, I found a way to undo it. Look at this.”

Lyra read, “ _To uncross a trick disturbing a home, go to the trickster’s house and throw a rotten egg towards it over your left shoulder…_ Oh, let’s do that! I don’t believe in this stuff, but if she does, imagine when she finds that egg and realizes we’re ahead of her game! Good find, Max!” she turned towards the document she was supposed to be focusing on, “Better than I’ve got. Zero leads on this damn piece of paper.”

“You’ll get it,” Max reassured her, “You’re a wizard with those. Or, like, I don’t know, an alchemist.”

“An alchemist!” Lyra perked up, “That’s it! Triangles!”

“Hm?”

Lyra returned to the _Dictionary of Symbols_ and opened a page she’d previously overlooked – the old alchemical symbols for elements and compounds.

“It’s not an alphabet!” she exclaimed, “They’re alchemical formulas! Probably instructions to show invisible ink!”

As she set to decoding this, Max noticed the thin book she’d snuck out of the social science shelves. Lyra saw him reach for it a moment too late. She slipped it under the bigger _Dictionary of Symbols_ , but not before Max saw the title. It was _So You Think You’re LGBT: A Guide for Teens_ , by the BC health board.

“Anything good in that one?” said Max.

“Not really,” said Lyra, “It’s a lot of, this is okay, accept yourself, talk to people you can trust, here are a bunch of community centres in Vancouver. I filled out a quiz on the back page. It’s supposed to tell me if I’m gay.”

“And?”

“I definitely am.”

“You knew that, though.”

“I thought so, yeah… What do you think this big one is? It’s, like, the symbol for saltpeter inside the symbol for fire.”

“Maybe it’s saltpeter on fire.”

“Saltpeter means gunpowder.”

Max grinned. “Fantastic! Let’s blow up this sheet of paper.”

Lyra couldn’t help but share his enthusiasm. The “saltpeter on fire” symbol was by far the biggest and most central on the document. If there was a secret to be revealed, that was how they’d do it. Probably just a tiny bit of firework powder lit atop the sheet would reveal a message in the moments before it burned away. Now that was security!

They left the library and the _Dictionary of Symbols_ behind, though Lyra held onto the _Guide for Teens_ to peruse later. Max kept _Voodoo Tricks_ in case Delilah tried any more curses on them. As they slipped out, they noticed the two Mounties from the opening ceremonies speaking with the librarian. She pointed them to the twins’ table in the back corner, but by this time they were out the door and away.

Not far from the library was the main street general store. Lyra had heard from Wendy that you could buy fireworks and a lighter there, no questions asked. She bought the cheapest firecracker she could find, and a small box of matches.

Out on the sidewalk, as the stagecoach trundled by, Max was balancing on the curb in a newly folded newspaper hat.

“Where’s the document?” said Lyra.

Max froze, and his eyes went to the folded paper atop his head. He buried his face in his hands and cried, “Ugh! I’m being silly again!”

“Wait… No! It’s brilliant, look!”

Lyra stopped him from whipping the hat off his head and unfolding it. Instead she lifted it off and showed him the triangular front he’d folded.

“How old is the folding pattern to make a hat like this?”

“Dunno,” Max shrugged, “Old. Hundreds of years, probably.”

“Take a look at it.”

With the sheet folded over, the random lines and curves on the edge of the sheet had become a clear picture across the intersecting folds.

“It looks like a map,” said Max, “If that curve was a river… _the_ river… This other one was the railway… and this grid is the town! As it would have been in, what 1900? 1910?”

“Something like that. And I thought these triangles were an alphabet – they’re mountains!”

“Mountains! Of course! But not this one, it’s in the middle of town. Isn’t that the one you said was gunpowder?”

It was. Though now that the triangles had nothing to do with alchemy, it wasn’t really. And she was going to burn the document!

“It must be, like, an X marks the spot. But, you know, it’s a triangle thingie marks the spot. It looks like it’s on main and… five streets down from the train station, on the southwest corner.”

“Great! And let’s be quick about it. I don’t think those Mounties were at the library to check out books.”

“I don’t think the one with the bell can read,” Max agreed.

Main and fifth. Easy enough. They rushed down to the marked intersection and found an old stone bank, now a pub, on that specific corner. Central in the ornamented parapet was the same triangular symbol as on the map. It was carved into the peak of an abstract stone ripple that spread across the neoclassical portico.

Max frowned, “Think we need to talk to a waiter in code or something?”

“Can’t be,” said Lyra, “This would have been a bank back then. Maybe there was a safety deposit box with some treasure in it? But then why go to the trouble of leading clues somewhere you’d look first anyways? No, I bet the next clue is in the architecture.”

They stepped back into the street to examine the building from every angle. Nothing revealed itself. Aside from the strange ripple across the façade, it seemed like every other building on the street, if older and more elaborate.

Max slumped onto a bench, lay down and looked at the pub sideways. A moment later, he slid around so that his feet stuck skywards and his head hung towards the sidewalk. “Hey building! Be less stupid!” he called. Then, a moment’s pause, and he cried, “Wait! It worked! Look!”

Lyra joined him on the bench and swung around to lie upside-down. Her hat fell off and her hair dangled onto the sidewalk, but he was right. What had seemed a strange mess of whorled stone right side up became clear as day when inverted. It was the figure of an angel, with outstretched wings and flowing robes.

“I think I’ve seen that before,” said Max, “A while ago, when we first got to town, with Nora. Or, I mean, Lady Vigrid. We were walking in the cemetery. There’s a statue there.”

As they righted themselves and set off again, the twins spied the pair of Mounties not far down the street. They ducked off down an alley before making their way across the railway tracks. Over the hill beyond, they reached the gravel road that led into the cemetery.

Nearer the entrance, the place was like any other. Polished stones marched in rows along sunny lawns and hedges. A charming cottage stood nearby. The intrinsic morbidity of any graveyard was well countered here by the open field and soft breeze. Further from the front rows, however, the graves grew older. Shading pines had grown up among the rows, giving a rustling voice to the wind. Moss had grown over the stones and obscured the ancient names. It was still too bright and calm to be properly eerie, but it was a world removed from the bustling downtown just over the hill.

In the very deepest part of the cemetery, where fledgling grove turned to true forest and graves were scattered at random, there stood a statue of an angel behind an unmarked flagstone. Her face, a mask of sorrowful beauty, was cracked and lichen-painted. Her wings lay folded on her back. Her arm, trailing a stone gown, was outstretched mournfully to the heavens. The statue stood atop an unlabeled plinth

Clearly the angel was pointing to the next clue. It was around here that Lyra was beginning to wonder if they’d actually recognize the conspiracy when they saw it. For all she knew, this statue was itself some damning evidence against Nathaniel Norwich. No, it couldn’t be. They’d recognize it when they saw it.

But the angel wasn’t pointing quite at anything. Her finger was held upwards, her arm outstretched. Her arm pointed essentially nowhere, at that. To follow its line would send Lyra off into the woods, through some farm fields, and eventually up against the slopes of Pyramid Peak.

While she pondered this, Max scrambled onto the statue’s plinth to inspect it.

“It’s like she’s picking a ghost’s nose!” he said, “Look at this!” He demonstrated by leaning out from the plinth and sticking the angel’s finger up his nose. Lyra was just about to tell him off when his weight shifted something in the hand. There was a significant-sounding click. 

“Ha!” said Max, “Who’s silly now, Pacifica?”

The ground beneath the statue began to grind. The sunken flagstone split along an unseen fissure and slid away into hidden pockets beneath the sod. Behind it was a slab of granite, labeled in thick letters:

**HEREIN LIES**

**THE RIGHT HONOURABLE SIR QUENTIN TREMBLANT**

**WHO WAS**

**AN EXPLORER**

**A PIONEER**

**FOUNDER**

**OF THE TOWN OF GRAVITY FALLS**

**MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT**

**FOR THE DISTRICT OF YALE-CARIBOO**

**AND**

**THE FITH-AND-A-HALFTH PRIME MINISTER**

**OF THE DOMINION OF CANADA**

**MAY HE REST IN PEACE**

The twins took a moment to read this over. Once, twice, Lyra scanned the words, before she and Max burst out.

“Quentin Tremblant? Who’s Quentin Tremblant?”

“Founder? Then, Nathaniel Norwich…”

“Prime Minister?”

“ _Fifth-and-a-halfth?_ ”

The beam of a flashlight lit up the stone from behind them.

“That’s none of your concern,” said an officious voice. They heard the peal of a cowbell.

* * *

**IV**

Lyra had never been handcuffed before. They were harder and colder than she’d expected. Sheriff Blubs marched her out of the graveyard as Deputy Durland handled Max. If anyone noticed the twins being led back to the courthouse where this had all started, they said nothing.

They were uncuffed and released into an office. The place was spartan: a table and a couple of chairs, rough carpeting, fluorescent lights. Lyra immediately went to the mirror along the wall and laid the back of her fingernail against it. No gap for the thickness of the glass. That meant it was a two-way mirror, with an observation room on the other side. Of course it was. The place was exactly like every police interrogation room she’d ever seen in a movie. 

They didn’t have to wait long for Chief Blubs to return. He plopped his expansive bottom into a chair and gestured for the twins to take the others. He held a very old looking manila folder stuffed full of documents. The Author must have stolen the map from that very folder! Lyra itched to touch it, just to know her fingers were tracing the Author’s six.

“I’m sorry for treating you two like criminals,” Blubs began, and he seemed to truly mean it, “But this is a highly confidential case. National security is involved.”

“National security?” said Max.

“Yes,” said Blubs, “We’ve been trying to find Tremblant’s grave for decades. It’d be a catastrophe if it became public knowledge.”

“But why?” said Lyra, “Who is Quentin Tremblant? What’s so dangerous about him?”

“He’s exactly what was on his grave,” said Blubs, drumming his fingers on the folder, “From all we know, he was the founder of the town. A well-respected, capable man. Got himself elected to Parliament. He played his cards well in Ottawa and climbed to the government’s inner circle. And when Sir Mackenzie Bowell died in office, he became Prime Minister.”

“Then why haven’t we heard of him?” said Max, “The first Prime Minister from the west. The, what, sixth? In the country.”

“See for yourself,” said Blubs. He opened the folder and carefully slid a yellowed newspaper across the table.

It was the _Daily Globe_ , dated to 1895. The headline declared, in bold print, _TREMBLANT CLAIMS EXISTENCE OF FAIRIES – DOCTORS DOUBTING SANITY_.

Fairies. Thin lines were drawing in Lyra’s mind, but no firm connections yet.

“I don’t get it,” she said.

But there was more. Blubs showed other old articles, all from that same year, all on the subject of the vanished Prime Minister. 

_TREMBLANT SEEKS TO INTRODUCE CURRENCY OF NEGATIVE VALUE._

_TREMBLANT APPOINTS NINE-YEAR-OLD BOY TO SUPREME COURT_

_TREMBLANT URGES IMPERIAL ACTION AGAINST ENORMOUS MAN-EATING SPIDERS_

“Our man seemed like a capable politician until he took the highest office. Then it all went wrong. It’s a stressful job, I guess,” said Blubs, “After months of this, his own government took action.”

The last sheet Blubs placed was a photocopy of a very old-looking letter. Despite being a single page, something about it carried weight beyond that of the newspapers. Lyra strained to read the scanned writing.

_Dear Mr. Tupper,_

_The situation of our so-called Prime Minister, you will no doubt agree, is inconsolable. The doctors and lawyers may argue his case to their ends; it is clear to any layman that Mr. Tremblant is a fool and a madman, and entirely incapable of leading our Parliament._

_As we approach a new century, history stands at a crossroads, and our young nation is regrettably vulnerable. We stand before a fracturing world as the example of peaceful partition from Empire. Recovered from their Civil War, our southerly neighbours are once more unified; the threat of expansionism cannot be ignored. Division within the Dominion itself threatens us. For such a time as this, Canada requires leadership capable of uniting French and English, Catholic and Protestant, Indian and European, Liberal and Conservative. Canada requires a man capable of inspiring strength as a nation and standing before the world as the conduit of this strength. Quentin Tremblant is not this man._

_Your position would allow you to move your party to action on a unified plan, mine the same. In one month Tremblant will travel to London and speak not only with Queen Victoria, but governors of the Empire across the world. Immediate action must be taken lest this imbecile solidify Canada’s position as the laughing stock of the globe._

_I propose a coalition between our parties for the purpose of impeaching Mr. Tremblant from his office. It shall be the Blind Eye Coalition, for its purpose is to hide this marked shame from the world of the future. Indeed, the best case is not that Tremblant ceases to be Prime Minister; it is that he never was. I propose that you yourself take up his office; it is for the good of the nation in the face of this terrible shame, only, that I would suggest such a thing as allowing my partisan opponent the highest office. But if it were to prevent the age of Tremblant, I would gladly retire from politics altogether. Furthermore, I propose that this apartisan Blind Eye Coalition remain in formation until such time as all records of Tremblant’s life, his very existence, are exclusive and confidential property of the Government._

_For Her Majesty’s Empire and our Dominion,_

_“A Mari Usque ad Mari”; “Annuit Cœptis Novus Ordo Seclorum”_

_Sir Henri Charles Wilfrid Laurier_

_May 1896_

Lyra finished the long letter and looked up at Chief Blubs.

“Wilfrid Laurier?” said Max, “As in, _the_ Wilfrid Laurier?”

“From the five-dollar bill?” Lyra put in. This was the only thing she knew Laurier from, but it clearly meant he was very famous.

“The very man,” said Blubs, “That’s his signature. No forgery. I wish it was.”

“The coalition happened, then. They wiped him from history.”

“In a collective effort never before seen. He was just too silly to have ever been Prime Minister.”

“Is the Coalition still in effect, then?”

“I don’t think so,” said Blubs, “It must have dissolved during Laurier’s term.”

Lyra leaned back in her chair, half-giddy. What a conspiracy! A secret Prime Minister! This was beyond anything she’d imagined. But there was something missing. This was all brilliant, but how could they rub it in Pacifica’s face?

“Nathaniel Norwich!” she remembered suddenly.

Blubs nodded and slid two further letters.

_Dear Mr. Laurier,_

_I must say I find the office of Prime Minister quite rewarding. I must thank you for your idea! The Coalition’s efforts to save face do seem to be progressing well. Nor’wester divisions from Ungava to British Columbia, Assiniboia to Franklin, wire in reports of newspapers and billfolds successfully destroyed._

_However, one significant piece of evidence must be dealt with. Preceding his political career, Tremblant’s coal mining claims in the West sprouted about themselves a community of considerable population. If we are not to risk the people of this colony disturbing our endeavour, a suitable replacement must be found for Tremblant’s founding of this village, just as I have been the replacement for his office._

_My plan forthwith is to write the mayor and relevant authorities of this place. It is known, I believe, by the name of Gravity Falls. The authorities of Gravity Fall might then select a founder more to our collective benefit._

_Best wishes; Annuit Cœptis,_

_Sir Charles Tupper, P.M._

And the other:

_Dear Mr. Prime Minister,_

_We require a man who may be simple and ignorant enough to accept Tremblant’s history and holdings without question, and not to know or enquire of their true nature. I believe I have just the man. The name of my stableboy is Nathaniel Norwich; he is a simpleton, quite obviously suited for nothing but shoveling manure and beating blankets. As a pawn, unquestioning and obedient, indeed incapable of the complex thinking which deception or curiosity would require, he will serve quite well._

_Best wishes,_

_Thomas Foster, mayor of the village of Gravity Falls_

Now that could definitely be rubbed! Lyra tried a sideways grin at Max and caught the same in return. Then they remembered that conspiracy or not, they were under arrest, and were now privy to sensitive national secrets. Blubs took back his newspapers and copied letters, tucking them inside the folder. The folder itself he lay on the table, with the documents they’d seen sticking out one corner.

“What now,” said Max, “Are you going to kill us?”

There was a dramatic squeal from behind the mirror. Apparently Durland found this prospect stressful.

“No, No!” Blubs cried, looking mighty concerned as well, “Nothing like that! Don’t worry! We’ll just have you sign a non-disclosure agreement, bound by the Security of Information Act. That means you can’t tell anyone else what we’ve told you today, okay? It’s the law.”

Lyra nodded. “The law,” she said.

She was fairly sure it was also against The Law to enter a storm drain. It was certainly against The Law to enter an abandoned store through its duct system.

Deputy Durland entered and gave the twins a pair of sheets to sign. They did, barely reading them. Then they were ushered out of the room with nary another word.

* * *

**V**

The twins wandered aimlessly down main street. The festivities were already wrapping up, the booths shuttering and being hauled away. The road had been opened to traffic again, the twenty-first century growling back in with a vengeance. 

“It’s great that we found all we did,” Lyra pondered, glancing at the stage being disassembled from the courthouse steps, “But we never did find a way to embarrass Pacifica. We know the truth, but with no proof she’d just laugh us off.”

Max burst into a grin he’d been repressing for some time. “ _Au contraire, ma sœur_. The proof is right here.”

Lyra’s eyes might have popped out of her head. Inside Max’s shirt were three old pieces of paper. It didn’t take much to recognize them as the three letters from Laurier, Tupper, and the old Mayor.

“You swiped those from the police station?”

“How could I not? They were sticking right out of the file and the chief wasn’t looking. I’m sorry. Are you angry with me?”

“Angry!” said Lyra, “How could I be! This is your chance to show Pacifica you’re not silly.”

“It’s not, though. We signed a form. It’d be illegal.”

“Would it?” said Lyra, “Aren’t contracts signed by minors without a guardian not legally binding? So, we’re not really under the secrets act at all! Let’s send them to her!”

Max held the letters up to the sun, and a ponderous look passed his face.

“You know what?” he smiled eventually, “We wouldn’t have found Quentin’s grave if I hadn’t been silly, would we have?”

Lyra thought of him folding the map into a hat, looking at the building upside down, picking his nose on the angel. No, they wouldn’t have, that was true enough.

“I was silly enough to follow the silly-hunt of a man so silly he was wiped from history. That’s silliness for the ages, don’t you think?” Max was beaming now. “You know what, Lyra, I don’t care about making Pacifica think I’m serious. Being silly is awesome. A part of our heritage! I’ve learned my lesson.”

Lyra looked at him for a moment.

“Well, I’ve learned nothing!” she said, “Come on. We’re going to the copy store. We need two versions of these.”

Twenty minutes later this was done, and a pair of carefully addressed envelopes hit the bottom of a mailbox with a satisfying thud. Lyra took a moment just to look at the slot where the copies had vanished.

“Hey, Max, you know how in books and movies people are always finding out how empty revenge feels?”

“Mm-hm?”

“Those are full of it. Revenge feels awesome.”

Then they were off to the dumpsters behind the grocery store, to find a rotten egg for Delilah’s porch.

* * *

**VI**

That night in the attic:

One fact, a fairly simple fact, kept nudging at the back of Lyra’s mind.

Quentin Tremblant knew about fairies. He’d come from Gravity Falls and, like the Author, he knew about fairies. More connections. How to keep them all sorted out? After a whole day of conspiracies, it was obvious, if clichéd.

Lyra had taken a roll of fishing line from Gruncle Stan’s tackle box and a stapler from his office. She was busy now writing words and drawing symbols on dozens of paper scraps by the flickering light of the oil lamp. 

A note reading JOURNAL – AUTHOR? went up first, stapled to the sloping attic roof over her bed. Then, everything about which the author knew or had investigated. Ghosts, fairies, the Tremblant coverup. The last two of these she linked with another bit of thread, making a triangle.

The triangular eye went up with the ten symbols, all strung together with line. She put a thread from the wheel as a whole to JOURNAL, and another one from the six-fingered hand. And what of the eye? Well, that connected back to fairies, recalling Max’s wedding ceremony. The pentagram went to a new note which read DELILAH and from there AMULET and PSYCHIC? Some notes – GOBBLEWONKER/MCGASKET and COPY MACHINE – had no connections to anything.

The conspiracy took shape, but no pattern emerged. It was still all a mess, a set of points with only tenuous threads between them, and the map made it even more obvious.

Max rolled over on his own bed and looked up at Lyra’s work.

“Interesting,” he said, not sounding like he meant it, “But if you want that to mean anything, it looks like you need–”

“More data,” they said together.

But not tonight. Lyra rolled back in bed, Max doused the lamp, and she fell into dreams of vast, meaningful spiderwebs.

* * *

**VII**

**July 9**

Dawn broke gentle into the great hall of Norwich Lodge. Pacifica padded noiselessly across the old-growth floorboards in finely embroidered silk slippers. Her nightgown – a new one, shipped in from Paris – fluttered in time with the lacy curtains on the hall’s arcing windows. She liked to walk the Lodge in these early hours. Before her parents were up, she could pretend that she ruled the house, as she would one day, as all Nathaniel’s children before her had. From the windows of the hall, the pines of Norwich Hill fell away dramatically. Pacifica could see the shine of sun on the river as it curved through town, where four thousand little people lay sleeping – or toiling in her father’s mines, perhaps.

She was distracted by the soft falling of paper through the front door. Mail time. No doubt there’d be the usual commendations to Daddy from bribed ministers and fellow mine tycoons, perhaps an invitation to a party in Vancouver. The only reason for a Norwich to go to the city, of course, was to tell of how much better the National Energy Gala was, held in that very hall of the Lodge every August.

Pacifica casually picked up the first envelope. It wasn’t properly sealed – not with wax, not even with glue. A piece of scotch tape was all that held it shut. How crude.

And – her heart fluttered – it was addressed not to the senior Norwichs, but to her, Pacifica.

Pacifica snapped the tape and found within a trio of photocopied somethings. She sat down on a plush velvet sofa nearby to read them.

A strangled cry leaked out of her throat when she’d finished. It was only then that she saw what had been written on a post-it also stuck in the envelope, and the cry became a sob.

_Pacifica: The other copy got sent to the CBC. Love, Lyra Pines._

_Rg dzhm’g uzxv gsvb dzmgvw gl hzev  
Yfg hvxivg zinrvh uiln gsv yizev_


	7. Book Seven: The Shape of Chlorine

**I**

**July 10**

In the week after Prospector’s Day, the forest fire smoke from the north fought its way into a break in the Pacific Chinooks. The hottest stretch of the summer came to lie heavy and grey on Gravity Bend. The cedars withdrew in the muggy air, leaving the hazed sun to blast the open spaces and scorch the forest floor. Even the night lows rarely dipped much below thirty, and daytime highs hovered even near forty. Stan had hung up his Mr. Mystery jacket and was giving tours in a sweat-through shirt. The trickle of tourists that had also seemed to evaporate in the heat was too sluggish too care. They were seeking air conditioning, not quaint supernaturalism.

On the second day of this smoggy assault, Wendy didn’t come into work. The other Mystery Shackers barely noticed, being slumped on the floor of the museum, the only space with air conditioning. They’d elected not to move until a busload of customers came, at which point Stan would force the twins outside and Soos into Wendy’s till. Or maybe they’d all just melt first.

“Where is Wendy, anyways?” said Lyra.

“Oh!” Stan remembered suddenly, “She told me yesterday. She got a new job. At the aquatic centre.”

“Doesn’t the pool sound nice today,” Max mused.

“Yeah,” said Lyra, thinking, e _specially if Wendy’s there_. “You wanna go?”

“Yeah! Gruncle Stan, can we go to the pool?”

And so, the Mystery Shack was closed to all ten or so potential visitors that afternoon, and they drove to the aquatic centre. Built more for après-ski hot tub soaks than summer dips, it was technically an indoor facility, under a low gable across the tracks from downtown. But in the summer months, the vast picture windows rolled up and it became a shaded outdoor oasis, more gazebo than building, open to the rare breeze but cooled by the mist of splashing bathers. Predictably, there were many.

“There’s nothing like sitting in a moist hole with a hundred strangers,” said Stan as Lyra met him, Max, and Soos coming out of the change rooms, “It’s like a bus, but wet.” Stan gazed regretfully at the yawning windows, likely pondering why he’d paid ten dollars for two children’s and a senior’s admission when they opened right onto the lawn. This after he’d told the twins to “look like you’re twelve” to avoid paying the single extra dollar of the youth rate.

The twins walked the perimeter of the not-quite-a-building, checking the place out. Max scanned the crowd, spying a girl relaxing in the deep end with her legs under an air mattress, and nudged Lyra.

“Dibs on the brunette over by the snack bar,” he said.

“Go nuts,” said Lyra, “She’s probably straight anyways.”

“If not, I’ll let you know. Is it hot in here or is it just her!”

Lyra stopped him from leaping into the pool after his newfound attractor. Admittedly, she was a stunner. Heavy eyes, cascading dark hair, an exotic allure that was hard to place. Wearing an old-looking bikini top. She stretched her shapely arms up from the side of the pool, and Lyra’s heart skipped. She pushed the feeling away. That’d be unfair to Wendy.

“Yes, Max, it’s thirty-seven degrees out. It’s hot everywhere. And can’t you go one week without a new crush?”

“No,” said Max, and fell in the water.

Soos, who’d been watching this from the wayside, said “Ah, the power of young love. Classic.”

“He thinks,” said Lyra, “But he’s all talk. He’s taking it from, like, those sappy indie movies that he’s set for this grand romance before the summer’s over. Truth is, he’s never even kissed a girl. He always messes up somehow and runs away.”

“Well, you know, tragic exposition comes before the best hero’s journeys.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Let’s go see if Wendy’s here.”

She was, reposed in a high chair between the pool and hot tub. She wore a red cross lifeguard pinnie over a swimsuit that was, nicely for Lyra, a half-size too small. She beamed at Lyra, Stan and Soos when she saw them, which had to mean she was specifically beaming at Lyra, right?

“Hey, Mr. Pines!” she said.

“Wendy,” said Stan, “Where’s the lifeguard?”

“I’m the lifeguard, Mr. Pines. I make the rules for you now!”

Stan grumbled off, bitter about the tables having so suddenly turned. As he turned to go, a water balloon broke against his back. He turned on Wendy with a deadly glare. She looked back innocently, dropping her steam-specked glasses to the end of her nose, but made no effort to hide her bucket of balloons. Stan stormed off to find himself a deck chair.

“How long have you been a lifeguard?” said Lyra.

“Had the training? Since grade ten. But it seemed like a bad deal until I found out they got free snacks. Plus, I got the best seat in the house!”

“Yeah you do!” Lyra squeaked, her voice cracking, and then giggled for too long before abruptly cutting herself off with an awkward gasp.

Soos glanced from Lyra to Wendy and back and said, “Dudes, are you having a staring contest? Because I think…”

He never finished, because Lyra had pushed him into the pool. Wendy blinked.

“So, you want to go chuck more balloons at Gruncle Stan?” said Lyra. She tried to casually slip her thumbs into her pockets, forgetting that she was in a bathing suit, and ended up just sort of rubbing her thighs.

“Love to,” said Wendy, “But I’ve gotta stick around here. I’m supposed to be doing tryouts for the assistant lifeguard. Don’t see anyone here, obviously.”

And there was her in.

“Hey,” said Lyra, “What if I was the assistant? I can, um, well, I can swim.”

Wendy perked up, “That’d be awesome! Alright, give me two laps of front crawl, head down, then, uh, do CPR on this flutterboard. That’s a tryout, right?”

Easy enough. Lyra had learned CPR in Scouts, once, very briefly. She did it and then popped back to Wendy’s chair.

“You’re in,” she said, and tossed Lyra her rescue can, “Hang around here until Mr. Polchik comes in.”

Polchik. She’d heard that name before, with a touch of dread to it.

“Your boss?”

“Yes. And if you think Stan’s a hardass, just you wait.”

* * *

**II**

Max popped out of the water with a heady gasp. He’d been half-blinded by chlorine and it was still dripping from his hair into his eyes as he looked around for the girl with the air mattress. As luck had it, she’d noticed his theatrical entrance and was already looking at him, dramatically clutching the mattress to herself.

“Hey!” cried Max, pushing his hair out of his eyes and nearly slipping back underwater in the process, “Crazy running into you here!”

The girl blinked. “Do we know each other?” she said, in an implacable accent.

“Ha! No,” said Max.

“How long have you been underwater?” said the girl.

“Oh, you know. Since the last time I was… above water. My name’s Max!”

“ _Kloshe sun,_ Max. _”_

“Oh! Foreign languages! Are you from Quebec?”

She giggled. “I don’t even know where that is!”

Max noted this as a little odd but moved past it. “Your hair is beautiful,” he said, and it was true. Her dark, perfectly carefree curls tumbled to just above the waterline.

The girl stroked her curls. “I do not believe that. It has silly tangles. The chemicals in this place are not good for it.”

“Chemicals? Oh, yeah. That’s probably true. Good thing we just shower off and go home, I guess.”

The girl looked beyond Max then, out the window to the woods. Her eyes were forlorn.

“Hey!” said Max, “If you’re worried about your hair, I’ve got a little comb. It just sort of hooks into my bathing suit, see…” He propped one leg on the side of the pool and reeled backwards. The girl propped up his back with one arm, still gripping her mattress with the other. Stabilized, Max tore open the Velcro pocket on his trunks and pulled out the little plastic comb. It twisted off a key string, and he passed it to her.

The girl took it and began to run through her hair in great sweeping motions. As she took her arm from Max’s back, he fell into the water with a considerable splash. “Tell me, Max of the pool, what other wondrous things do you have in your shorts?”

Max righted himself and spat some water. “Oh, you know. Locker key. Coupla toonies to buy snacks. Hey, you want to get a hot dog or something?”

She glanced at the snack bar, not far away, and froze mid-comb. Slowly, her arm fell to the water. She passed Max back the comb.

“The snack bar? No, I cannot.”

“Why not? I’ll buy. Are you on a diet?”

“Not a diet, no… I am hungry, actually…” she glanced around furtively, “I must go. I’m sorry.”

She dove for the centre of the pool, moving with the swift grace of an Olympic swimmer even as she pulled her mattress behind her.

“Wait!” Max called after her, splashing wildly and making no headway, “You can go, just tell me why!”

The strange girl glanced back at him. Were those tears in her eyes, or just pool water? “It’s a secret, ah-ha, yes, a terrible secret,” she said, and vanished into the crowd.

Max knew it would do no good chasing her, even if she wasn’t uncommonly fast in the water. But beyond the heartbreak of her departure, there was a piquing of his curiosity at her cryptic words. Perhaps this was how Lyra felt about, well, everything. He paddled back to where he’d left his sister, but she was gone. Off looking for Wendy, no doubt, but Wendy was gone from the lifeguard stand too. Maybe they were kissing in the girls’ locker room. Good for her.

Max ran a few laps on the waterslide and waited for his love to return.

* * *

**III**

Mr. Polchik was one of the more viscerally frightening people Lyra had ever met. The way he paced the pool deck, all six-and-a-half feet of him patterned with bulging veins, reminded Lyra of a circling shark. He didn’t have the don’t-bother-me-and-I-won’t-bother-you placidity of a shark, though. The wildness in his eyes was somewhere between that of an eagle and a cougar. So, it was a good thing that Wendy was taking charge.

Polchik marched out onto the pool deck in a way that made flip-flops seem like military wear, and shouted, “Cordon! What’s the word on the A.L.?”

“Right here,” she said, clapping a hand on Lyra’s shoulder, “This is Lyra Pines. She was a Scout.”

Polchik came before Lyra and stared down a hawklike nose at her.

“That’s good,” he said, “But this is no summer camp! Mommy and daddy aren’t pitching your tent for you here! When anarchy boils over it’s your job to handle it!”

Lyra looked over the pool. Little kids were splashing and tossing light rubber balls around. Old ladies were relaxing and chatting in the hot tub.

“I think I can handle it,” she said.

“CAN YOU HANDLE THIS?” Polchik screamed and ripped his own hand off.

Lyra nearly threw up right there in the kid’s pool before she realized he was holding a plastic prosthetic. Polchik’s right hand was cut off above the thumb and smoothly scarred over.

“I lost that to a filter back in my day,” he said, “Back when they were real suckers, not these snowflake sippy cups they made us install. God, you could clear a contaminant before you knew it was there! Our old baby could rip a turd to shreds. TO SHREDS, Pines!”

“Okay,” Lyra whimpered.

“Even now, these waters might LOOK friendly, but that’s what we want THEM to think! WE are the flutterboards against chaos! The watchers of the slide! This pool, she’ll turn against you the moment you waver! Respect her! FEAR her! Do you think you have what it takes, girl? Do you?”

Wendy gave a squeeze of Lyra’s shoulder. Her touch coursed through her like a shot of adrenalin.

“Y-Yes,” said Lyra.

Polchik stood up straight and held forth two things. One, a red pinnie with a white cross on its mesh. Two, a plastic whistle on a lanyard. These he lowered, each in their time, over Lyra’s neck.

“Welcome to the deep end, girl,” Polchik said gravely. Then he hit Lyra on the back so hard she nearly threw up again.

* * *

**IV**

Noon came around, and Stan was forced to vacate his seat to get lunch from the snack bar. This was a mistake.

Stan’s deck chair was the perfect one. It was positioned by the window, in the breeze, but half-shaded by a spreading poplar outside. It was close enough to the snack bar, bathroom, and hot tub to make for easy trips, but not so close it was in the flow of things. He had been pleased to discover it many years ago and had insisted to Mike Polchik on many a pub night that it never be moved. He’d spent the car ride there that morning telling an enraptured Soos the chair’s legend.

Stan ate his hotdog and returned to his seat. When he got there, a chubby girl with white hair was reclining in it.

“Pines!” said Delilah Gleeson, “Were you sitting here? I had no idea!” She beamed up at him in a way that said, yes, I did, Stan, I knew.

Stan ground his teeth and said, “Get out of my chair, kid!”

“Your chair?” Delilah smiled, “It’s the pool’s chair! Really, isn’t it all of our chair? Isn’t it a free country?” 

Then she winked. That was enough to tip Stan over the edge. He forgot that he was in a public place and became aware of two simple facts. One, Delilah was light enough for him to pick up along with the chair. Two, the edge of the pool was right there. Right there.

Not five minutes later Stan was being escorted out of the pool by his own cashier and niece.

“Come on, Lyra,” he begged, “You’re going to defend her? I thought you hated her as much as I did.”

That was true, but she wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity to boss Stan around for once. Anyways, she wanted to see what Delilah thought of the egg she’d left on her porch.

The girls exchanged grins. “Race you back to the no running sign,” said Wendy.

* * *

**V**

Max had ridden the waterslide fast and slow; he’d chilled out and warmed up in the hot tub and steam room both; he’d leapt from the diving board in every position. The hot morning was drawing into scorching afternoon, and the crowd at the pool was ever more grateful for the shade of the roof. Max had eaten a quick lunch and decided it was time to look for the mysterious girl again. In a moment of inspiration, he bough a second hot dog and dove clumsily into the pool with it. 

He surfaced with a crowd still separating them and side-crawled over to her. She was, as always, against the edge of the pool with her air mattress held at her waist, bobbing down to bring the water’s edge to her chin.

“Hello again,” he said.

She smiled gently, not seeming to rebuke him. “Hello, Max.”

“I got you lunch,” said Max, “You said you were hungry. It’s a bit wet but it should still be good. Probably.”

“But why?”

“Because you were hungry? It’s good to share things. Snacks. Secrets?”

She narrowed her eyes at him and whispered, “You want me to tell you why I cannot leave the pool.”

Max shrugged. “Only if you want to.”

“Your wet sausage does look delicious. Oh, very well. Because I trust you. And you are the only friend I have in this place. Dive down.”

“What?”

The girl unwrapped the hot dog and indicated the water under her mattress. “Dive down. Under the water. Look.”

Max sucked in a breath and bobbed down.

For a moment he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be looking at. There was only the wall of the pool, just past the girl – or where the girl’s legs should have been. Then something gentle brushed across his face.

Max looked up.

Across the bottom of the girl’s ever-present air mattress, something lithe and vaguely reptilian was moving. It looked like some aquatic creature, fluked like a dolphin but clad in shimmering fish scales. Max couldn’t find its head. It seemed to have none, instead fading away to show the girl’s shapely waist behind it. No, not behind. It faded _into_ her waist.

Max’s head began to whine. In the moments before he broke the surface, he understood. He opened his eyes and met the girl’s own, staring with intense purpose. She was finishing off her hot dog in silence.

Max began to say, “You’re a mer…” but she silenced him with a gentle finger before he could finish.

It hung between them unsaid. _You’re a mermaid_.

“I should have guessed,” said Max. “It makes so much sense! And there’s so many other things like that in this town! Wait, that’s not what I mean. I just mean, Gravity Falls has a lot of things… things are people… that are like you. Not like you. I mean, things most people, most land people, wouldn’t think were real. Like you.”

“Unreal things! Like what?”

“Fairies. Ghosts. Little otter people.”

“Kushtaka!”

“You know them?”

“Of course. They are pests. We cannot keep them off our kelp gardens. You say that landfolk don’t know them? How strange. I don’t think of them hiding.”

“They hide up here. My sister had to crawl up a sewer to find them… Oh, I have to tell Lyra about you! My sister loves all this weird stuff! Not that you’re weird. You’re lovely.”

The mermaid leaned in and spoke in a whisper as her tail flukes brushed Max’s shins. “Please don’t speak of me to your sister! I trust you, but it’s a secret! I don’t want to think what the landfolk would do if they knew me.”

Max nodded. “Okie-dokie. No introducing Lyra and… I never did get your name, did I?”

She hung her head and smiled. “I have been called Mariana.”

“Have been called?”

“I have been called this because this is the name given to me.” She bobbed her head down to the water again.

“I see. Okay. Mariana, how did you get here? Shouldn’t you be frolicking in the ocean?”

Mariana swooned and lay a wrist across her forehead. “Oh, yes! It is a tale of great woe!”

“Woe! Oh, woe is woe!”

“I was born at the bars of Wimahl, where these waters meet the endless sea. We were the chiefs of all waters that met there! Great warriors we were too. Any landfolk ships that passed by us, we judged. Those who would harm our great rivers, we sunk to the shoals.”

“Then one tide not so long ago, word came from our tribute nation here in Vigrid of the North. The time had come, they said, for our people to gather back to these high ancient waters. Our leaders chose to send a scout to those waters and return with news.”

“You?”

“Yes. I swam up the big river, past the waters of the snakes and the Ogopogo. I leapt the stone walls your people built and hid from your boats. But in time, I reached the old river, and waited to see what I would see. In waiting, things went wrong.”

Mariana swam across the pool, beckoning for Max to follow. All the way she went, she trailed her mattress to cover her tail. Max kept close behind it to further shelter her from the pool’s prying eyes. They came to the bank of open windows that looked west to the river, to the mountains beyond, and eventually, past ranges and forests and fields, to the ocean.

“It happened over there, in the waters by the iron lines.”

“The railroad tracks? Where they cross the river?”

“Yes. A landman sat on the bridge and put a hook in the water. I was snared in the tail and hauled away, bleeding. He did not know what I was. He started to carry me away to here but fell. He goes off to find more landfolk and leaves me gasping for water on the landweed. I never saw him again. Perhaps the red ghosts took him, I cannot say. But I crawled and I crawled until I found the water here. It was strange tasting and lifeless, but I could breathe. There was nowhere else I could go.”

Mariana dipped her neck again, and Max saw now that flaps of skin on her neck flared out to take in water as she did. Gills. She had gills. When she bobbed back up, haven taken a breath, her eyes remained downcast.

“I’m sorry,” said Mariana, “I did not mean to tell you so much. It was too much.”

Max hesitated for a moment, then lay an arm on Mariana’s shoulder. She looked up. Her eyes, he noted, were the deep blue of a northern ocean, shimmering bright in her dusky complexion. Max extended his thumb and Mariana turned her head aside, letting him brush it across the little ripples of her gills. Despite himself, Max couldn’t help but think of them as cuts. Old, bloodless cuts. Like Lyra’s scars.

“It wasn’t too much,” said Max, “It was good. Now I know who you are. I’d tell you about me, but I don’t have a good story like that.”

Mariana eased Max’s hand off her gills and put in on her air mattress. “You can tell me about the above-water,” she said, “I have watched the people here. They are at play, but why? Why play in the water when they can play on land where they were born?”

Max bit his lip, thinking of an answer for that. He fell back into the water, drifted his arms about for a bit, and felt, rather than thought of, the answer.

“Because it’s cool when it’s hot and warm when it’s cold, and it’s just nice to float,” he said, “You must get that. After being on the ground didn’t it feel good to get back in the water and not have to push yourself up? Just let the water do it?”

“Yes. Do landfolk feel that too?”

“I think so. It’s probably different having legs. But we still like to get in the water where we don’t need them. Maybe we want to pretend we’re like you!”

Mariana pondered this for a moment, then dove into the water and swam tight circles around Max. He glanced down. She was looking at his legs, prodding them curiously. She surfaced back behind her mattress and said, “When I was a young girl, I would play landfolk with my friends. We walk our tails along the shoals and pretend to jump and run. It was such fun, it broke my heart when I understood that I would always have a tail. It is a silly old hurt, but it helps it to know that landfolk pretend to have tails.”

“That’s true!” said Max, “I think every kid who goes swimming has put his legs together and tried to kick like a mermaid. It doesn’t work very well.”

Mariana shot halfway across the pool and back in two flicks of her tail, even with the drag of her mattress covering it. She grinned at Max upon returning as if to say, it works perfectly well, thank you very much. He giggled.

They spent the rest of the afternoon chatting about life in water and on land. Five-thirty came around all too soon. There were a few alerting chirps of an electric megaphone as Wendy and Lyra giggled together over some awaited announcement. Eventually Wendy dictated, “Attention, pool potatoes! The aquatic centre will be closing in thirty minutes. After that we put the crocodiles in. If your kids are too slow, sorry!”

The pool began to empty. Max looked from the light crowd filing into the change rooms, and to Mariana.

“What will you do?” he said.

“Hide under the water as I do every night,” said Mariana, “Will I see you tomorrow?”

“Yes! Oh, yes! How about tonight?”

Mariana frowned, “No one is here at night.”

“Yes, it must be lonely! I’ll be here as soon as I can. I can’t stay the night, but I can bring you dinner. Cool?”

“Cool,” Mariana smiled, “You must tell me more about the land.”

She dove under the water and lay herself in the corner where the bottom of the deep end met the wall. It broke Max’s heart to see his wonderful friend press herself into the wall like a fugitive, but what could she do? She _was_ a fugitive. If Wendy saw that she wasn’t leaving the pool, she’d try to haul her out, and then what?

Max felt he was tearing himself out of the water. Once he was on the deck, though, he felt better. Mariana was a mermaid, after all. She lived her whole life underwater. It wasn’t as if she was drowning. 

He found Lyra leaning on Wendy’s vacated lifeguard stand as Wendy walked the perimeter of the building sliding down the many yawning windows. There were a few suspicious screams as she did this.

“Good day?” said Max.

“The best!” Lyra bubbled in a barely contained whisper. “We spent all day screwing around. All day! In bathing suits, too! If this keeps up all summer…” Lyra’s face fell as she glanced out the window, “Well, I won’t get as much time in the woods looking for paranormal stuff. But it’s worth it, isn’t it?”

Max shrugged, “That’s up to you. It would be for me. It is for me!”

“Oh, yeah, your girl. How’d that go? How many restraining orders have you got?”

“Hey! She’s nice. She’s really nice, and she’s… we’re friends now.”

“Just friends, eh?”

“For today.”

“Oh, you’re taking things slow for a change.”

“Yeah, maybe you should try it! You’re being _way_ too fast with W…” Max wisely shut himself up as Wendy returned and greeted him with a punch to the arm.

“All locked up?” said Lyra.

“Yep,” said Wendy, “I had to dunk a few kids’ heads in the hot tub because they didn’t want to leave.”

“Isn’t that, like, toxic?”

“Probably not for just a second. They left, so it’s all good.” She tossed Lyra a set of keys, which she fumbled for and nearly dropped down the overflow grille. “Polchik told me to tell you to lock up. We’ve had people steal supplies before.” Beet red, Lyra nodded. Wendy gave her a tight hug and headed out. Lyra was left all but shaking trying to hide a rapturous expression.

“Wait for me outside?” she said to Max after a moment.

So, Max went to get changed and waited in the parking lot for her. Even at six in the afternoon, the sun was scorching. As he waited and fanned himself, he formulated a plan involving Lyra’s keys.

The twins walked home in comfortable silence, each thinking on their own of their pair of pool girls. It was a quiet evening. Max made pasta for dinner and they settled into the attic early. It was too hot to have a fire and nothing good was on TV. The twins played a few rounds of crokinole, and there was still light in the sky when they crawled into their cots, submitting to the happy drowsiness always born of chlorinated days.

Lyra left her pool keys next to the unlit oil lamp on the Grœmblins crate. Perfect. Max forced himself to stay awake until he heard her breathing drop off, then slunk out of bed. He palmed the keys silently and went to gather some of the old _National Geographics_ that Lyra has been reading. Lyra’s eyes opened a crack when he stepped onto the ladder down out of the attic. It creaked like no wood Max had ever heard, after all. But it was common enough for one of the twins to make a bathroom trip in the night that she just rolled back into the nook between her mattress and the roof and drifted off.

There was still twilight in the west as Max walked along the highway through the woods. Crickets sang and bats whorled overhead. By the time it was truly dark, he was under the glow of town streetlights, picking his way through streets to the pool.

It was easy to get into the building. After spending every morning unlocking the sticky doors to the Mystery Shack, Max had almost forgotten what properly fitted and oiled locks felt like.

There was a romance to the moonlight streaming in the eastern windows, and Max felt no desire to search for the light switches. He’d changed into his swim trunks back at the Shack and headed right onto the pool deck through the French doors to the little people-watching area, where he left the magazines on a plastic table. Over the fence and around the pool, he couldn’t see if Mariana was twisting away below the surface. Presumably.

Max entered the pool with a jump into the deep end, throwing his arms up. Just as he hit the water, his eyes reflexively shut. He plunged straight down, brushed the tiles with his toes, and began the slow bob back to air.

And then he was being pulled down, squeezed around his ribs. Max opened his eyes to find he was inches from Mariana’s face, and she was holding him tight, pulling him away from the surface. Flashes came through his head of Lady Vigrid tying him down, Delilah hanging Lyra over the mill. Just his luck. Third time was no charm at all.

The air in Max’s lungs was beginning to turn sour. He wriggled his arms from the mermaid’s embrace, but before he could push her away, she let go. An expression of shock came over her – eyes widening, gills fluttering, tail writhing like a worm on a hook. Max gestured upwards. With a nod, Mariana grabbed Max around the waist again and threw him to the surface.

He broke from the water with a mighty gasp, pushed his streaming hair from his eyes, and looked around for Mariana. She breached the surface not far away, shooting high and landing soft.

“I’m sorry!” she shrieked, “I forgot you breathe air! I never had a friend who breathes air!”

Max found his voice and shot back, “I thought you were trying to kill me!”

Marian gasped aloud. “No! Never! Not if the golden sun himself told me to!”

“Oh good! All my last girlfriends have been murderers.”

Marian laughed, a sound like a trickling brook, and reclined to float on her back. She flicked up ripples from the tip of her tail. Her air mattress was beached beside the pool. No need to hide under it with no one around. Her hair fanned out on the water. Moonlight sparkled off her scales. What a vision she was!

Emboldened, Max asked, “Can you do that jump again that you did when you came up?”

“Like this?” Mariana dove underwater and then leapt up, arcing over the pool, silvery and more beautiful than any shooting star. There was barely a splash as she slipped back into the water. She popped back up behind Max and poked him playfully in the head.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said, “It’s a long time until every morning.”

“I know,” said Max, falling into a backstroke that was embarrassingly clumsy next to a mermaid, “I brought you some magazines, by the way, if you wanted to learn more about the land.”

Mariana beamed at this, so Max got out of the pool and fetched some of the magazines. Mariana rested her head on the pool deck as Max lay himself out and they flipped through. He’d seen the issue before, but he really wasn’t looking at them. He was watching her, watching her face fill with wonder at the world revealed beyond the rivers and pool. She marveled at photos of twisted desert trees and showy tropical birds, shivered at reading of thunderstorms, and laughed aloud at the sight of horses swimming in a river – something she no doubt knew, but had never seen from above. When she flipped to a shot of climbers on an icy pinnacle, she gasped and called Max to explain.

“You’ve never seen mountains!” he said.

“Not like this!” she said, “It looks as cold as the freeze-over moons. This can’t be summer?”

“It can,” said Max, “High up, away from the ocean, it gets cold even in the summer.”

“It is like the deeps off the great shelf. I’ve heard tales from explorers who go over the edge into the dark cold. In the sea we have the deep. On the land they have the high!”

“That makes sense!” said Max, “I guess there’s strange places to explore on both sides of the water.”

He turned to another page and showed Mariana the picture there, of a traditional wedding in the South Pacific. But rather than giggling at the colourful costumes as he would have thought, she grew solemn and pushed herself away from the edge of the pool to float on her back, staring up into the rafters.

Max paddled over to her. “What’s wrong?”

She let out a deep sigh. “It hurts to see the families. I may never see my family again. I don’t know if they worry for me.”

Max’s heart wrenched. All this time and he hadn’t thought of the rest of Mariana’s people. Of course she hadn’t been a lone curiosity all her life. He thought of being out here under these strange mountains and Lyra being back in Ontario, how lonely it would be to be torn from every last bit of family. The decision was made in an instant. He floated up beside his friend and rested a hand under her head, weaving a pinky finger into her hair.

“Mariana, I’m going to help you get home,” he said.

She looked aside. “What? How?”

Max let his hand drop. How indeed.

“I’ll think about it,” he said, “I don’t know yet. But I can walk on land and you can breathe underwater. There’s got to be something in that.”

Mariana smiled gently and pulled him into another hug. She pushed him to arm’s length and they drifted together for a moment in the moonlight, treading water, her scales brushing his shins.

Suddenly it came to Max’s mind that this was the closest he’d ever been to kissing a girl. If there was a time, he thought, this was it. He leaned in, and Mariana leaned back, more confused than anything.

“What are you doing with your mouth?” she said.

Max drew back and let her go, realizing he’d been puckering his lips.

“I was eating some sour candy before I got here,” he said, “I just got a bit of sour.”

“Oh,” said Mariana, “Do you have any more? I’d like to try land candy. Landy.”

“No. That was, uh, that was my last piece.”

* * *

**VI**

**July 11**

Morning dawned on a night absent of the usual mountain chill. Lyra left the house early, not long after the early summer sunrise, but long before most of the town was stirring. And yet, she was just ready to leave when Gruncle Stan found her in the kitchen. He was disheveled from sleep and emanating a smell that it was remarkable a simple wash-up could dispel. He put on a pot of coffee.

“Lyra!” he yawned, scratching under the scrap of stained tank top on his shoulder, “I was thinking. You can get me into the pool, right? You’d do that for an old man, eh?”

Lyra avoided his gaze by focusing her own on the trees out the window and gathered up the last of her things. He seemed to get the message.

“Alright then, Sappho,” he yawned, “When you get home, can you wash out the ice cream freezer in the gift shop? Some kids stomped on the creamsicles and I gotta be giving tours.”

“What!” said Lyra.

Stan shrugged. His coffee began to feed from the crusty old machine. It was just a shrug, but it clearly said that either Lyra would scrub melted creamsicles out of an airless tank, or she’d make her own dinner. 

She made a point of slamming the door on the way out of the Shack.

Lyra was sweating in the musk by the time she got to the pool. Most summer mornings in Gravity Falls, she still needed a sweater. As early as it was, Mr. Polchik was already there, pacing restlessly in the lobby. The doors were unlocked. Lyra thought she might creep into the change rooms while he was in his own mind, but he jerked up at the sound of the door. Lyra snapped to a salute, though she’d never heard Mr. Polchik actually ever ask for one. He just hewed so closely to the military archetype that it was instinctual from movies.

“Pines!” he shouted.

“Yes!” Lyra squeaked.

“The front doors were open! Did you see Cordon lock up last night?”

No. She’d tossed Lyra the keys and she herself locked up. She’d double-checked to be sure the locks were sturdy, she was sure of it.

“I didn’t see her do it,” said Lyra.

Polchik turned away and paced some more.

“Tell her to see me when she gets in.”

Lyra swallowed a lump and carried on. She had no plans to do anything of the sort.

Wendy showed up not long after, suddenly brightening the morning, and people began to trickle in as the day warmed.

After the rough start at home, Lyra’s actual shift was a godsend. Wendy managed to wheedle a dozen bags of chips from the poor snack bar guy and kept them in her rescue bag all morning. After a fair few more joint waterslide “inspections” than strictly necessary, which had the perk of Wendy all but wrapping her legs around Lyra’s waist so they could have more weight for the drops, they settled in by Wendy’s stand and get to people-watching. Max had arrived right at opening and spent the morning playing Marco Polo and water polo with his dusky beauty of a friend. Funny – Lyra had been watching, and never seen her come in. Soos arrived later in the morning, cheerfully greeting the rest of the Shackers. When he went to grab a tube from the toy box, Wendy waved Lyra over and Lyra witnessed her unforeseen ventriloquism skills.

“ _Soos_ ,” a rubber duck seemed to say, _“Soos, do you hear me?_ ”

Soos’ eyes bugged out and he leaned in close. “Rubber duckie?” he said, “Are you talking? Is this magic, like the river snake?”

Wendy mouthed “River snake?” at Lyra. Lyra just shrugged. Wendy kept throwing her voice to the duck.

“ _Yes, Soos, we’ve always been alive. My people are captured! You must free us!_ ”

“I’ll do what I can,” said Soos with a serious nod.

Lyra’s gut hurt from holding in laughter as the girls rushed away. Once they’d run a safe distance, they slumped against the wall and broke down giggling.

Lyra carried on doing rounds, people-watching, as was technically her job. Like the other day, kids played, adults relaxed at the edges of the pool, and the more stoic adults sat in the deck chairs reading. Lyra caught the headline on the front of the _National Post_ as she wandered past a table. _“Secret Prime Minister” Letters a Hoax, Experts Say_. Well, what did they know? Quentin Tremblant was real whether those so-called experts wanted to admit it or not. At least the story breaking might erode some of the town’s worship of the House of Norwich.

Wendy mostly relaxed in her stand, Snacking and checking out swimmers. She nudged Lyra in the side at one point and said “What d’you think of that beefcake?”

She followed her finger to a muscular young man waiting for the diving board. Lyra hadn’t even noticed him. What that was she was supposed to find attractive? Skin bulging in every direction like some twisted Michelin Man? It was a wonder she hadn’t found herself out earlier. 

“He sure is, um…” Lyra floundered for some semblance of a straight girl compliment. “Lumpy?” she finished with a shrug and looked to Wendy for assurance. They sat for a moment with locked eyes. Today, Wendy’s eyes reminded Lyra of trees reflected on an almost still, sun-dappled lake. Lyra was too enthralled even to feel embarrassed of her own eyes, brown as dirt. Take the hint, she thought desperately. Then in an instant it was, God no, please don’t take the hint. She went back and forth several times before they broke eye contact. The lumpy boy had vanished into the mouth of the slide by then.

“You’re right,” Wendy said anyways, “Not my type. He’d rather sit in a gym pushing handles than get out and do something. Bleh.”

Score. “So what would your…” Lyra stopped herself on the precipice of saying _dream guy_. “Who’d your ideal partner be?”

Wendy leaned back and looked into the rafters.

“I guess, like, more of an adventurer,” she said eventually, “Someone who finds things out by just going for it, you know? Someone who’s not afraid to come to a fork and take the stranger trail.”

Forget butterflies. Lyra had hornets in her stomach right about then. Fortunately, at that moment Wendy rushed off to stop a little kid from dropping a hot dog in the filter tank. Lyra held the stand and pondered her words. Take the stranger trail. Now, how could she do that from a swimming pool? 

She was interrupted by a sharp bellow from the door to the manager’s office.

“PINES! Here!”

Lyra collected herself, pushed down a rising tide of anxiety, and marched obediently over to Mr. Polchik.

“I’ve been thinking about it all morning,” he said, as if that were an introduction, “And I think you’re the woman for the job.”

“I am!” Lyra said, and then collected herself and said, “For what job, sir?”

“I need you on stakeout tonight! No more break-ins! I won’t have our supplies stolen! This facility has to be protected at every hour!”

“What – all night?”

“I SAID it wouldn’t be easy! Did you think this was an easy job?”

“What? I mean, no sir! But when will I sleep?”

“Tomorrow! When Cordon’s on watch!”

Lyra just nodded and froze herself down. Polchik’s stalking wolf aura couldn’t last long. In this state, with his precious pool threatened, he was a bowstring hauled tight, which couldn’t stay drawn without snapping. Predictably, he eventually backed off with a sharp, “See me at closing!”

And so, the roller coaster of the day dipped back down. An extra shift was fine, but an extra shift without Wendy? And even when she came in in the morning, she’d be too sleepless to have any fun. Lyra’s perfect job was beginning to sour, but what could she do? It was here with Wendy, at least part of the time, or back at the Shack with only Gruncle Stan. And Polchik had to be planning to hire a more permanent night watchman, no? This was just a couple sleepless nights. She had all summer.

But still, the job had soured. It was beginning now to feel like a proper job, and were the guests getting rowdier? Lyra had to break up two fights between some little kids and keep running after people trying to bring food into the pool.

Morning dragged into the afternoon and evening. Lyra had a moment’s levity with Wendy chasing stragglers into the change rooms, and then they rolled down the windows and Wendy was gone. Polchik bid Lyra goodnight, and the lights fell. 

The sun set an hour or so later. The aquatic centre at night was a gloomy, cavernous place. During the day, sunlight shone clear through the water to the azure tiles below. At night, there was a single dim emergency light that turned the water dark and silvery. The windows rolled down were more like mirrors in the dark. In the long, quiet, sleepless hours after sunset, Lyra found herself having visions of an enormous cave, lit with a grid of hanging stars and filled with lakes of oily void. It was a primordial scene, something out of time, like some twisted prehistoric creatures would be born from the water and wander a world without sun.

For some time, Lyra walked the perimeter of the pool. But what was the point? She slumped into a deck chair and listened to the lapping of tiny waves through the filter. If only she’d brought a book, or the Journal. But why would she have brought the Journal to what seemed a normal day at work? Maybe she could get into Polchik’s office and see if he had anything to read, or a TV, or a radio that could play through the PA system. After two days, surely, she would have noticed whether or not there was music playing in the pool during the day, but she couldn’t recall.

The next thing Lyra knew, twilight had turned to night, and there was an imprint of the deck chair’s stiff canvas against her face. Something was rattling against the window across the pool. No, someone was rattling the window.

She was up in a flash and across the room. All the ennui of the night had drained away, and a clear plan was now racing through Lyra’s head. Find the intruder, win Polchik’s graces, keep the job at the pool, sleep nights again, kiss Wendy. Simple.

Lyra switched on her flashlight and trained it out the glass. A gaunt face stared back at her, ghastly in the sharp flashlight light. It took a moment before Lyra realized it was familiar. She unlocked the window and rolled it up a few feet.

“Gruncle Stan?”

Stan stopped, multi-tool and wires still in hand. He was still disheveled from sleep, and he’d thrown on a misbuttoned shirt with a pair of swim trunks.

“What!” said Stan, “Hey kid. I told you I sleepwalk, right? Hey, where are we?”

“You broke in here last night! Why? Gonna steal pool supplies?”

“I… what?” Stan drew himself up, “No! This is my first time here. Why would I want pool supplies? My crime is better. I’m gonna steal the best seat for when Delilah gets here. Can you imagine the look on her face?”

Lyra could, and had to stop herself from grinning at the thought. 

“No!” she said, thrusting the flashlight, “I’ll call Polchik. Get out!”

“Yeesh, okay. I’m going. Good luck catching the breaker from last night, then. He might be here any minute. Wait, what’s that?”

“Where?”

Stan gestured somewhere outside. Lyra pushed the window higher to step out and look. The night grass was cold against her bare feet. Then with a gleeful cackle, Stan leapt inside and slammed the window shut.

“Hey!” Lyra cried, “Gruncle Stan! Open it! I’ll call Polchik! I’ll call the Mounties!”

Stan stood behind the glass, hands in his pockets, watching Lyra like a zoo animal, as if she were the one locked in. Because, Lyra suddenly remembered, she had the keys, not Stan. He couldn’t get that window open again, but she could get back in through the front door. Huffing and turning away, she set off around the building.

There was a rustle in the bushes, something else moving. Lyra turned on her cold, wet heels and turned her flashlight on the newcomer.

A figure rose from the shadowy greenery. Max stood gaunt-faced and squinting in the sharp beam light.

“Max?”

“Hey,” said Max, “You’re here. Right. The night guard thing.”

“Yeah. I have a job. What are you doing here?”

Max just shrugged. “So, you’re in and out of the building all night? Fun.”

“Well, no, I’m supposed to be inside. I just… dropped the window. I’m going back in. What are you doing here?”

Max wrinkled his eyes, apparently in thought. “So you’ve got keys?”

“Yeah, but, what…”

“Hey, uh, sorry,” said Max.

Lyra said, “For what?” and then Max tackled her. She was thrown to the grass, the wind knocked from her stomach. Max was pinning her down with his shoulder as one hand grabbed at her hip. For a wild moment she thought he was trying to get her shorts off, but no, he was unclipping the pool keys from her belt loop. Max gave a shove to roll Lyra off balance and then he was up and away across the lawn.

Lyra steadied herself and rose to her feet, now smeared with dewy muck. Max was already away around the corner. Barefoot, cutting through spiny patches of mulch and doing her best to avoid junipers, water bottle knocking against her hip where she’d clipped it to a belt loop, Lyra was slow to gain on him. By the time she’d reached the corner herself, she’d heard the click of the lock. By the time she reached the front door, Max had vanished inside and it was locked again.

What _was_ he doing there? Had it been him last night? She’d heard him get out of bed sometime before she fell asleep and hadn’t heard him come back.

Lyra jiggled the handle ineffectually for an embarrassing minute before remembering her escape from the closet. She’d worn her exploring-the-woods shorts for the night shift, so yes, her knife was still in the pocket. But the doors at the Mystery Shack were decades old and had been cheap in the first place. The Aquatic Centre had a state-of-the-art modern lock with probably a computer chip in the key or something. Lyra spent ten minutes poking around inside it to no avail, fuming. Stan and Max, both here for whatever inscrutable reasons. Was Soos going to show up, too?

Just as she was ready to give up, there was a telltale creak of the window opening again. Lyra abandoned the door and went back around to the side.

Max had the window propped open and was maneuvering a big, heavy beer cooler over the sill. He noticed Lyra and hauled it through with extra force.

Lyra recognized that cooler. The snack bar kept drinks in it. It hit the ground with a mighty thump and a high-pitched yelp of shock from Max. He began to push it across the wet grass, sliding it like a dogsled.

Pushing the cooler, Max was slowed, but he was still impressively fast despite its weight. He had a head start. Lyra had no shoes. By the time she closed the distance, Max had pushed the cooler to the edge of the lawn where bramblier ground began to slope down to the river. She dove and managed to hook a hand on Max’s ankle, pulling him away from the cooler and sprawling him on the ground.

Lyra tried to strike an authoritative pose and said, “For the last time, Max. What are you doing?”

The cooler thumped, or what that a bat passing overhead?

“Nothing,” said Max, gathering himself quickly and standing in front of the offending box, “Nothing’s going on. Nothing fishy, ha.”

“What? Ah, never mind. I don’t have time for this. Just give me the cooler. Please. If that goes missing, I’ll lose the best job ever.”

“I get it. Wendy and all that. Actually, isn’t that her there, in the bikini?”

Lyra turned to scan the lawn. “At night? What?”

Before she could turn back, Max was off down the shallow bank, shouting, “Sorry!”

Lyra broke into a run that was quickly slowed by the piercing ground. Max was even faster with the hill on his side. Oh, if only she had shoes!

“Hand over the pool stuff in the name of pool law!” Lyra shrieked.

“Pool law is stupid!” Max hollered back.

He came to a stop by the dark edge of the river in the shade of a spreading poplar. Lyra could see only the occasional glint of starlight on the water and hear its trickle along the bank. It took a moment of training the flashlight around to find Max positioning it by the water. He was cornered.

Lyra stomped a foot for good effect. “The jig is up!” she said, “Hand over the cooler!”

“No!” said Max.

Lyra had no further shouts for this. His persistence was bewildering, more than anything else. Gruncle Stan had more than one cooler just like that one. What made pool gear so special?

She couldn’t summon another shout. “Why?” she said, finally, “Why do you need it?”

Max, too, looked weary. Still panting from the run, he just turned to her and let loose a whole torrent of words.

“Look, I need it to save my friend, she needs water, and I could put water in the cooler, and it was big enough for her, and she needs to be in the water, breathing water, because she’s a mermaid. Okay?”

He overturned the cooler with a sturdy kick and a woman rolled out. No, not a woman. A girl. Max’s girl, the pretty brunette. She lay curled up on the grass, gasping for air. How has she fit in there? How were her legs curled up so tightly? Because, Lyra realized in an instant, her legs weren’t constrained by the limits of the human skeleton.

The paragraphs came unbidden to Lyra’s mind, the sketches of tails glimpsed through the fog from the Author’s canoe.

_Merfolk sightings, in contrast to most of the shadowed people, are no more common around GF than elsewhere in the waters of the PNW. However, artifacts in dredgings date back father here than elsewhere… suggests origin t[????]rk as others? If so, what a remarkable, intelligent people, spread from QCI to at least California, prospered, hidden all the time._

A remarkable, intelligent, people… and here was one, gasping like a drowning fish (which she was) on the night-wet grass outside the aquatic centre, shoved into a beer cooler. She’d been working in the same building as a mermaid, stealing glances at her speaking to Max, for the last two weeks. It was embarrassing. What kind of explorer would miss that?

“Hell of a lead to bury,” said Lyra.

“Lyra, meet Mariana the mermaid. She’s a mermaid.”

“Kloshe,” gasped the mermaid, “Klahowya. Chuck!” Hadn’t she been speaking English before? Now, gasping for breath, she was obviously slipping back into her native – whatever it was. But the meaning was clear enough.

“Lyra!” Max squawked, “She’s in trouble! You’re a lifeguard! Give her CPR or something!”

“CPR!” said Lyra, in shock. She gathered herself enough to realize – “Gills! Merfolk don’t breathe air!”

At their feet, Mariana let out a pained, pitiful cry.

“Reverse CPR!” said Max.

“What?”

“Give her reverse CPR!”

Could that work? Instead of forcing the airways, forcing, what, waterways?

Lyra screwed open her water bottle and filled her mouth. Fresh water was fresh water. She knelt before Mariana and opened her mouth. Even as her eyes were beginning to glaze, the mermaid looked confused. Right. Not the mouth. Gills. Lyra turned the girl’s head aside and went to her neck. Sure enough, an array of slits ran along the side of her throat. Without a second thought, Lyra pinched Mariana’s nose, shoved her mouth shut with her palm, and kissed her neck. At first, at least, it seemed like a kiss. Then some buried lifeguard’s instinct took hold and it was more like forcing water through a pool noodle.

Then to Mariana’s chest, pumping to an imagined beat. Her ribs were soft somehow, her sternum almost pliable. Fish bones. Another swig of water. Back to her neck to blow fleshy bubbles. A thought came swimming up that Lyra was kissing a beautiful girl for the first time in her life, running her hands on her chest, and it was like this? Gills flapping against her teeth and fish bones grinding inside her?

Mariana gave a mighty heave and choked Lyra’s water from her mouth. Her chest was moving on its own now, and there was a sound from her body like water gurgling through hoses. She rolled over and gasped dryly for a moment before hauling herself hand over hand, tail writhing, to the water’s edge. She disappeared below the black surface with barely a splash.

For a moment the night was silent again. Then Max shrieked, “MARIANA!”

She smoothly broke the surface. Not gone.

“Thank you,” she said, in English once again, “But why not just roll me into the river?”

Lyra felt a hot flush spread up her face, gratefully concealed by the night. She took the chance to shine her flashlight on the bank near where Mariana had surfaced, letting her be lit by the diffuse light around the beam. Now that she knew, it was obvious the girl was something more than human. The sheen of her skin, the way her hair didn’t flatten in the water, her sheer sleekness, were all so obviously aquatic. The tip of her tail traced patterns in the water behind her.

Max wiped at an eye. “So now what?” he said, “Back down the river? Home?”

Mariana nodded. “Yes. I’ll call for them along the way. If they are still there…” her face fell.

“What?”

“They will have moved,” she said, “My people always journey north when the water warms. They said they would wait for me, but I’ve been gone too long. They may have given up. A clan can call for another singing together, but a voice alone is lost.”

Max sunk to his knees before her. “You can’t give up. You just need… Wait! A voice alone? What if that voice was louder?”

Mariana flicked her tail and perked up. “If it could be. But that’s impossible.”

“Maybe not,” said Max, “Lyra! You know that megaphone you and Wendy were making announcements with?”

“Yes?”

“It’s waterproof, eh? Didn’t you float it in the shallow end that one time?”

“Yeah, it’s all sealed. Polchik said it was expensive. But what does that have to do with… Oh, no. Look, no offense, but can’t she use… a conch or something?”

Mariana frowned, puzzled, at this suggestion. Apparently, she’d couldn’t.

“Wait here,” said Max, and took off running.

Mariana sidled down into the water then, flipping herself around in the current, happy to wait now that she was submerged again. She was fine here alone. Lyra took off running after her brother.

“Max!”

“What!”

He was already back through the window into the darkness of the building. Lyra followed. Max waited by the pool, looking around.

“Where do you keep that megaphone?”

“I can’t let her have it. Polchik is insane about inventory. He’d kill me, or worse, fire me.”

Max crouched down and ran a hand through the water lapping at the pool deck. They weren’t far from the spot by the snack bar where Max had thrown himself after Mariana, then just a nameless mystery, only a couple days ago.

“Okay,” he said, “I’m sorry. I get it. It’s just…”

He was more solemn than usual. “Just what?” said Lyra.

“I’m scared for her. What if she can’t find her way home? And what if they can’t hear her when she does? I keep thinking of her getting caught in a boat, or stuck in a swamp, or just always looking and never getting home.

“You’ve known her for two days.”

“Yeah,” said Max, “I don’t get it either. Maybe that’s what love is like? Like, you’d do anything for them even if you know there’s no chance you’d get anything out of it. I don’t know if I can explain.”

Lyra sat down next to him and put an arm on his shoulders. They both knew he didn’t have to; she knew exactly what it was like.

“It’s in the office,” said Lyra, “Give me the keys and I’ll go get it.”

Neither said a word as she did.

Back out by the river, Mariana curiously took the megaphone. It did indeed work underwater, as proved when she disappeared beneath the surface. A low singing, crackling with amplified energy, seemed to emanate for a moment from the whole length of the river. Lyra felt that those echoes through the water could be heard as far away as where the Vigrid met the Columbia, and from there down into the States to be carried on to the sea. Then it was silent again and Marian broke the water with no more drama than any other girl who happened to be swimming at midnight in a fast-flowing glacial river.

“It is perfect,” she said “Kloshe! Max, you’re so smart!”

“Ah, no. I’m not the smart one. You should talk to her.” Max jerked a thumb at Lyra.

“And she,” said Mariana. “But Max, there is no one like you I’ve met.”

Max lay down in the mulch and brambles to meet her eyes at the water’s edge.

“And I can really say, same.”

The tip of her tail flicked eddies in the current. “Before I go there is one land-thing I want to try?”

“What’s that?” said Max, and then she’d leaned in and kissed him on the mouth, long and quiet in the reflected diamonds of moonlight on the river.

Lyra made herself slight and looked away.

Neither said goodbye. After that, there was no need. Mariana slipped silently not the dark water, and the last the twins saw of her was a series of ripples gliding with the current into the night.

And with Polchik’s megaphone.

“You did the right thing, there Lizzie-fresh.”

“I know,” said Lyra, “That job sucked anyways. Oh, tomorrow’s gonna hurt though. I should get some sleep. Not like I need to keep watch anymore.”

Max yawned. “Same,” he said, “Back to the Shack?”

“No. I’ve got to still be here on Polchik’s bullshit stakeout. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Okay then. Night?”

“Night,” said Lyra. She gave him a punch on the shoulder, faked to shove him into the river, and pushed him off in the general direction of the Mystery Shack.

Max ambled away a moment, but before he left, he turned back and said with a grin, “Hey – that was my first kiss! And you! We got our first kisses from the same girl, who would’ve guessed?”

“Please don’t make me a part of this,” said Lyra.

Max laughed his way off into the night, practically skipping with ecstasy.

Lyra returned to the aquatic centre through the front door, went straight into Polchik’s office, and fell asleep in his desk chair, dreaming of a mermaid’s kiss.

* * *

**VII**

**July 12**

Lyra woke to the sound of a thunderous scream, cranking her neck and dashing her head on the armrest of an office chair.

“PINES!”

Lyra leapt to attention in an instant. Polchik was in the door of the office, shaking, and about the colour of an underripe saskatoon.

“Window WIDE open! MISSING MEGAPHONE! And how do you want to explain THIS!”

Still half asleep, Lyra thought she was hallucinating as Polchik heaved something into the office. It was Gruncle Stan, haggard and tired-looking, with the fabric of a deck chair affixed to the back of his shirt.

“It was Delilah Gleeson!” he roared, “She put glue on the chair! She couldn’t handle anyone else having it! The little witch!”

Lyra, still half-asleep, sat in a stunned and drowsy silence. Yes, Stan had been there last night, and he’d made it into the pool. What then? Lyra hadn’t even gotten back inside until she came into the office to drift off, and in the distraction of Mariana’s escape, she’d forgotten Stan entirely.

It was too early now to be frightened, so she said to Mr. Polchik, “That would explain that.”

“Don’t be smart with me, Pines!” Lyra wasn’t feeling particularly smart at all at the moment. “Who’s responsible for this?”

Lyra took a deep breath to ready for firing herself.

“It’s my fault, Mr. Polchik. I fell asleep.”

Lyra could see as Mr. Polchik stood stock-still that somewhere, deep down, he was spitting streams of air like the base of a pot about to boil, just before the placid surface became wrecked with the bigger bubbles. He stormed away from the office for a moment. Lyra heard a short, wracked cry, then the splash of something landing in the far end of the pool. Polchik returned, fully reddened, and shouted with what had to have been remarkable composure, “HAND OVER THE WHISTLE, GIRL!”

Lyra was only too happy to comply. It felt like a weight lifted from her neck. As she cut Stan from the chair and headed out, happy to let him wash the glue and fabric off his own back, not even caring to collect her pay for the two days and a night of abuse, Polchik stalked back and forth across the kid’s lagoon, muttering how if anything else went wrong today –

Stepping out of the pool for the last time, Lyra realized: it was summer. It was still summer, and she could catch the smell of the woods in the air. The heat wave had broken, and the sky over the mountains was clear and cool.

She spent the rest of the morning tracking down ghostsign and tree-eyes, marking them on a tourist map from the gas station to transcribe into the Journal later.

Sometime in the afternoon, Lyra went back to the Shack for a late lunch, creeping in from the side of the porch to keep away from Stan, who was sure to be surlier than ever today, the veil on his hate worn a little threadbare. Skulking in through the gift shop, she was spotted. At the sound of her name, Lyra jumped, but it wasn’t Stan’s voice. It was a friendly one she hadn’t expected to hear.

“Wendy?”

Wendy was leaning rakishly on the cash counter, waiting for someone. She’d been whistling “The Log Driver’s Waltz,” and Lyra had taken the noise to be Stan. “Hey gal,” she said, “I’m here to ask Mr. Pines for my old job back. You wouldn’t believe. Polchik fired me. Something about rubber ducks.”

“Rubber ducks?”

“Yeah. Someone came in last night, really late, and took them. There was a note in the basket, ‘The revolution is at hand!’”

Lyra recalled their pranks the previous day. “Oh, no. You don’t think…”

“Soos?”

“Exactly.”

And so it was that one by one, and all in a day, the Mystery Shackers were all banned from the Gravity Falls Aquatic Centre. But it was summer, and the summer sun sparkled off the river and the creeks and innumerable hidden swimming holes and springs hidden in the woods. From then on, when the heat grew too much, the twins retreated to natural waters. And when they broke the surface, Max would always give a glance downstream, looking for a message, watching for a friend.

* * *

**VIII**

That night in the attic:

Lyra lay awake and watched faint moonlight play on the strings of her spiderweb. She’d added a note for the mermaids, but as of yet it stood alone. More data. That would be easy enough; it tempered something of the ache of having lost the pool as an easy path to Wendy.

But that thought brought to mind what Wendy had said the day before. _Walk the stranger trails_. All the while she’d seen Wendy and the author as separate roads, but if the way to her heart was to play the lonesome dreamer and the hopeless wanderer, then who was she to argue?

The sound of the night wind playing against the open window seemed to call her forth. The road to answers, to questions of head and heart alike, lay beyond home, into the woods.

_Otiiqw vtwcm zeq cnni un uzaq otm qwqltqm gb zte;_

_Gb vzuqe mozpp otm xnwjfqenem ozrq mxzpqm zwi dpnvtwc ozte._


End file.
